









































isparchitecture.com

the future of modernism:
architectural intention and
adaptive reuse

frank mahan, AIA and van kluytenaar

Prelude

What does it mean for architecture to engage 
an existing building? The pages that follow address 
the singular importance of intention in the practice 
of adapting and preserving modernist architecture 
in the twenty-first century. There is a matrix 
of forces common to nearly every architectural 
project that shapes the final built object. Financial, 
programmatic, structural and environmental 

the 
preservation 
of an original 
design intent 
requires the 

extension and 
maturation of an 
original idea into 

a future that 
both maintains 
and reinvents 

the original. 

“

”

A man is judged by neither intention nor fact 
but by his success in making values become 
facts.When this happens, the meaning of the 
action does not exhaust itself in the situation 
which has occasioned it, or in some vague judg-
ment of value; the action remains as an exem-
plary type and will survive in other situations 
in another form. It opens a field. Sometimes it 
even institutes a world. In any case it outlines a 
future. History according to Hegel is the matu-
ration of a future in the present, not the sacrifice 
of the present to an unknown future; and the 
rule of action for him is not to be efficient at 
any cost, but to be first of all fecund.1

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Lan-
guage and the Voices of Silence”



AP . vol 5 . No 1 . 2020

12

m
a

ha
n

 &
 k

lu
y

te
n

a
a

r

constraints along with client objectives and tastes are all meaningful 
considerations that must inform the conceptualization of a new building. 
The aged building in need of restoration, however, contains an additional 
constraint: the need to engage with its unique history. The tradition of 
storytelling must be employed to synthesize time and place, bridging past 
and present. 

The practice of adaptive reuse—the preservation, renovation and reuse 
of an existing structure for a new purpose—links the building’s past with 
the contemporary world. It requires understanding a preexisting narrative 
as well as the crafting of a new narrative, one that both continues and 
extends the original.2 Existing buildings function as complex formal 
entities that develop over time and space, accumulate human experience 
and produce unique historical richness. This accumulation of experience 
must be accounted for in the building’s preservation and reuse. The 
significance of these experiences must be recognized and acknowledged. 
The narratives must be sorted and evaluated. Should nostalgia, for 
example, be a protagonist in the historical narrative of a building? Did 
historically significant events take place at the building? Did the building 
undergo alterations over its lifetime? Is the building considered significant 
in the eyes of the architecture or preservation community? Does the 
building occupy a place of pride in its community? A rigorous analysis 
and deep understanding of these existing narratives and the complexity of 
experiences they point to must provide the groundwork for the building’s 
future. This requires research into the building’s history. The historical 
context, the original design intentions, the building’s programmatic and 
construction history, its social and cultural associations, all contribute to 
its existing narrative and must form a fundamental constraint relevant to 
all adaptive reuse projects. The narrative must be told. And by reimagining 
this narrative, adaptive reuse links the past with the present. It creates an 
urban touchstone that is both history and invention. The preservation 
of an original design intent requires the extension and maturation of an 
original idea into a future that both maintains and reinvents the original.

Introduction

In 1952, the same year that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) built 
the watershed Lever House skyscraper (fig. 1)—thereby heralding a new 
synthesis of modernist ideals in architecture—the French philosopher 
Maurice Merleau-Ponty published “Indirect Language and the Voices 
of Silence,” one of the most important reflections on modern aesthetics 



13

isparchitecture.com

in twentieth-century philosophy.3 The essay 
describes the way in which the individual elements 
of an aesthetic object bestow significance on one 
another precisely by virtue of their juxtaposition. 
Their rigorous, rule-based arrangement produces a 
matrix of meaning which corresponds to the lasting 
quality of the work. Strikingly, important aspects 
of the enterprise of modernist architecture—
particularly as expressed in the work of SOM—
invite understanding in terms analogous to those 
found in Merleau-Ponty’s thought.4 Moreover, 
this understanding has farreaching implications 
for what it would mean to preserve the kind of 
aesthetic objects that modernist architecture sought 
to produce. These objects—like language itself—
bear meaning by means of an interrelationship 
of parts, the efficacy of which creates a seemingly 
unending world:

We always have to do only with architectures 
of signs whose sense, being nothing other 

This efficacy 
of the object 

depends 
primarily on 
the density 

of decision—
that is to say, 

intention—
inherent in 

the work’s 
conception.

“

”

figure 1: Lever house 
(prior to renovation)



AP . vol 5 . No 1 . 2020

14

m
a

ha
n

 &
 k

lu
y

te
n

a
a

r

than the way in which the signs behave toward one another and are 
distinguished from one another, cannot be posited independently of 
them.5
And further: 
It is as if each step taken called for and made possible another step, or 
as if each successful expression prescribed another task to the spiritual 
automation or founded an institution whose efficacy it will have 
never finished experiencing.6

This efficacy of the object depends primarily on the density of decision—
that is to say, intention—inherent in the work’s conception. Its commanding 
logic, or grammar, is everywhere present. For Merleau-Ponty, the lateral 
relations between elements born from the initial intention produce a world 
or matrix of almost infinite meaning. In contrast to the importance of the 
literal material of stone and craft—the literalism that is the theoretical 
foundation for contemporary theories of preservation—the meaning of 
modern architecture is found in the rigor of arrangement and relationship 
of its parts. The juxtaposition and relational positioning of architectural 
elements give meaning to the work.7 It is thus in the idea of the elements 
and their interdependence—rather than the materiality of the elements 
themselves—that modernism finds its value. And it is precisely this kind 
of value, this modernist ideal, that SOM sought to produce in the second 
half of the twentieth century.8

In 1935, three years after Henry Russell-Hitchcock and Philip Johnson’s 
“Modern Architecture: International Exhibition” at the Museum of 
Modern Art in New York City—and as Le Corbusier visited the United 
States for the first time—Gordon Bunshaft was in Europe as a Rotch 
Travelling Scholar, absorbing the ideas of early European modernism.9 
Less than a year later, Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings began a 
partnership that would become Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and, by 1950, 
the firm had completed several large projects including Manhattan House 
in New York, the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati, and the Brooklyn 
Veterans Hospital. It was the corporate headquarters for Lever Brothers 
Company on Park Avenue, however, built in 1952, that was to shape the 
image of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill as a notable proponent of postwar 
modern architecture. Following the Lever House project, SOM would go 
on to design a number of the most representative buildings of modernist 
architecture in the United States including the Manufacturers Hanover 
Trust building in New York City and the United States Air Force Academy 
campus in Colorado Springs. These projects proposed design concepts 



15

isparchitecture.com

that were grounded in the modernist sensibility 
of the time. Based on rigorous conceptual models, 
modern architecture no longer found its meaning in 
the literal materiality of stone and brick, but rather 
in the almost fathomless depths of its concept. 
This understanding of the modernist enterprise 
is particularly significant to the preservation of 
modernist buildings. The rejection of the literal 
and the material in favor of matrices of ideas and 
rules require novel approaches to the practice of 
historic preservation more adequate to the objects 
of interrogation.

Victorian Era Preservation

In 1849 John Ruskin published The Seven Lamps 
of Architecture where, in a section called “The Lamp 
of Memory,” he develops his now-famous attack on 
the practice of architectural restoration: “Do not let 
us talk then of restoration,” he writes. “The thing is 
a Lie from beginning to end.” For Ruskin, the act of 
restoration is primarily an act of destruction:

the old building is destroyed, and that more 
totally and mercilessly than if it had sunk into a 
heap of dust, or melted into a mass of clay […] 
But, it is said, there may come a necessity for 
restoration! Granted. Look the necessity full in 
the face, and understand it on its own terms. 
It is a necessity for destruction. Accept it as 
such, pull the building down, throw its stones 
into neglected corners, make ballast of them, or 
mortar, if you will; but do it honestly, and do not 
set up a Lie in their place.10

What is of primary significance for Ruskin in his 
understanding of 19th century architecture is the 
literal materiality of the structure, the craft of its 
production and the process of its aging. Particularly 
with respect to medieval stone buildings, Ruskin 
and other English Romantics found aesthetic 
meaning in the material’s weathering and decay, “in 

 Based on 
rigorous 

conceptual 
models, modern 

architecture 
no longer found 

its meaning in 
the literal 

materiality of 
stone and brick, 

but rather in 
the almost 
fathomless 

depths of its 
concept.

“

”



AP . vol 5 . No 1 . 2020

16

m
a

ha
n

 &
 k

lu
y

te
n

a
a

r

walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity.”11 As 
England was in the initial throes of industrialization, it became increas-
ingly fascinated by its preindustrial past. 12 Four years after publishing The 
Seven Lamps of Architecture, Ruskin published the second volume of The 
Stones of Venice, his three volume treatise on Venetian art and architecture. 
In a section called “The Nature of Gothic,” Ruskin emphasizes the impor-
tance of medieval and gothic craft arguing that, in previous epochs, art was 
the expression of man’s pleasure in labor. It was this sentiment that lead 
the protopreservationist William Morris to reprint “The Nature of Gothic” 
in 1892; helping to create the theoretical basis for the contemporary pres-
ervation movement. Morris described Ruskin’s paean to medieval labor 
and craft as “one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the 
century.”13 Both Ruskin and Morris—the theoretical grounding behind 
contemporary preservation theory—insisted on the virtues of high quality 
hand labor, and the importance of the material in considerations of archi-
tectural preservation.                                   
       This romantic response to the industrialization of Victorian England 
took more definite shape in the Arts and Crafts movement toward the 
end of the 19th century, heavily influenced by Ruskin and Morris, which 
advocated the traditional craftsmanship of medieval arts and architecture. 
In 1877 Morris founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, 
an organization that came to be called “Anti-Scrape” for its insistence that 
the materiality of historic structures be preserved without alteration. Any 
work on the building was “a feeble and lifeless forgery” and “deaf to the 
claims of poetry and history.”14 The Anti-Scrape movement sought to resist 
all tampering with the fabric of a given structure and to “treat our ancient 
buildings as monuments of a bygone art, created by bygone manners, that 
modern art cannot meddle with without destroying.”15 This approach, 
born of an era in which the character found in the literal and the material 
were of primary importance, indeed remains appropriate and necessary for 
a premodern architecture. In this context, the preservation of the literal 
suppresses the precise boundaries of time and place, combining history, 
memory and architecture to link the discarded and the fragmentary with 
new beginnings. And while the intended concept remains significant for 
Ruskin, this prioritization of the literal material of the building contrasts 
sharply with the idea that the significance of modernist architecture lies 
wholly in its concept, allowing for a preservation approach radically 
different from that of Victorian architecture.

Postwar modernism, however, requires a preservation approach more 
adequate to its purpose. While the preservation of premodern architecture 



17

isparchitecture.com

finds its meaning in the literal and the material, in 
addition to the idea of the building, the muse of 
postwar modern architecture is located primarily 
in the conceptual. And it is this distinction that 
has extensive and far-reaching implications for 
the preservation and restoration of modernist 
architecture. For if, in contrast to the valuing of 
the literal materiality of the structure, the meaning 
of postwar modernism is located primarily in the 
rigor of the concept, its preservation requires an 
approach radically different from that of Ruskin 
and the Victorian Romantics who would not have 
distinguished between the idea of a building and 
its material execution, understanding one as a mere 
extension of the other.

A notable counterpoint to Ruskin’s nineteenth-
century approach is that of his contemporary 
Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc whose unique 
preservation ideas have remained anathema to 
preservation thinking for nearly two centuries. In 
contrast to Ruskin’s emphasis on the significance 
of materiality, Viollet-le-Duc sought to maintain 
a fidelity to the original design, “to re-establish it 
to a finished state, which may in fact never have 
actually existed at any given time.”16 For Viollet-le-
Duc, whose work focused primarily on the Gothic 
and Romanesque, preservation finds its adequate 
expression in re-establishing an original idea. Such 
an approach functions as a kind of precursor to 
the modernist emphasis on the importance of the 
conceptual. His studies of nineteenth-century iron 
structures contributed to his interpretation of the 
Gothic as comprised of a rational scheme of skeletal 
forms designed to bear the weight of increasingly 
taller vaults. On this view, aesthetic value is to be 
found, above all, in the visual expression of structural 
elements—ribs, arches, and vertical supports—that 
compose the logical structural system. Preservation 
warranted modification to this logical system when, 
in the example of the Vézelay Abbey, the changes 
preserved the appearance of the original structural 

For Viollet-
le-Duc, [...] 

preservation 
finds its 

adequate 
expression in 

re-establishing 
an original idea.

“

”



AP . vol 5 . No 1 . 2020

18

m
a

ha
n

 &
 k

lu
y

te
n

a
a

r

intention.17 Although a relevant precursor to the modernist emphasis on 
the conceptual in its eschewal of materiality, Viollet-le-Duc’s attempt to 
recreate an original intention was often based primarily on an imagined 
fiction. The emphasis on the conceptual in the preservation of modernist 
architecture, however, benefits from advances in technology that allow 
for a more accurate understanding of a building’s original design intent. 
The greater the understanding, moreover, the more potentially radical the 
intervention. Knowing the entirety of the original design intention allows 
for a preservation approach that articulates that intention in ways more 
adequate than Viollet-le-Duc and more appropriate to the contemporary 
world. In contrast to Ruskin, Viollet-le-Duc and the Victorian belief in 
the equivalence of ideal intention and material articulation, the meaning 
of modern architecture is expressed in its idea, thus requiring a radical 
rethinking of its preservation.

Lever House

Consider, for example, New York’s Lever House (fig. 1)—an architectural 
icon heralding “the beginning of a new wave of American skyscraper 
construction and a new synthesis of modernist architectural ideals”—was 
restored in 2001 and its famous glass and stainless-steel curtain wall was 
completely replaced.18 Built in 1952 and designated a historic landmark 
by New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) in 1983, the 
building is exemplary of postwar American modernism. Situated on the 
west side of Park Avenue between East 53rd Street and East 54th Street, 
Lever House is a 24-story glass and stainless-steel clad office building 
composed of a vertical slab rising above a horizontal base. Taking 
advantage of a unique zoning provision, the project broke the tradition of 
“shaped tower” skyscrapers that predominated in New York City. Its glass-
sheathed façade and novel design concept became dominant elements of 
contemporary architecture. Its structure consists of two counter-posed 
volumes, balanced in proportion but contrasting in shape. And in contrast 
to the traditional commercial lobby, the ground floor is a two-story open 
plaza with a paneled glass gallery. The project introduced a number of 
innovations in skyscraper design including an integrally designed window-
washing mechanism and the concept of the ground floor public courtyard.

 The density or intensity or weight of decision—which is to say 
intention—in the making of its form is everywhere evident. The work 
is saturated with traces of artistic intention. And this intention is 
articulated by the lateral relations among its parts; in the language of 



19

isparchitecture.com

Merleau-Ponty, “in the eloquence of arrangement 
and configuration” that “implants a meaning in 
that which did not have one.”19 The entirety of 
the structure articulates a sureness of concept that 
made it a pioneer in American architecture. To 
begin, the plan features an open, colonnaded space 
flowing into the width of the Park Avenue sidewalk. 
Only one third of the ground floor is indoor space 
which is primarily enclosed by glass panels. The 
second floor then hovers over the entire site taking 
the form of a horizontal slab wrapped around the 
open courtyard below. The ground floor column 
grid is set back from the plane of the second-floor 
façade, giving the second floor slab the appearance 
of a weightless floating volume. The just 53-foot-
wide tower, a vertical slab set perpendicular to 
the avenue, is entirely glazed on three facades (as 
well as the returns on the rear façade) giving the 
building a crystalline and volumetric quality. Its 
exterior walls are a grid of stainless-steel mullions, 
anchored to the structural skeleton at each floor, 
which hold in place large and small panels of fixed 
glass. The large panels, functioning as windows, 
are green-tinted heat absorbent transparent glass 
and the small panels are tinted wire-glass spandrels 
concealing the floor slabs behind. These darker 
bands give the structure a horizontal emphasis that 
provides a delicate counterpoise to the verticality of 
the building’s columns and metal framing. And this 
juxtaposition of vertical and horizontal in the facade 
thematizes the vertical and horizontal volumes of the 
building more generally. It is the purposeful mutual 
inflection of elements throughout—its syntax—
that gives meaning to the building. That is to say, 
its meaning is found in the internal consistency of 
its concept. And it was to the appropriateness of its 
concept that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s 2001 
curtain wall replacement sought to respond.

In 1952 the building’s glass curtain wall was 
at the cutting edge of a new technology. Almost 
half a century later, it required restoration. Due 

It is the 
purposeful 

mutual 
inflection 

of elements 
throughout—its 

syntax—that 
gives meaning 

to the building. 
That is to say, 

its meaning 
is found in 

the internal 
consistency of 

its concept.

“

”



AP . vol 5 . No 1 . 2020

20

m
a

ha
n

 &
 k

lu
y

te
n

a
a

r

to construction material limitations, fabrication limitations, and weather 
conditions, the curtain wall experienced severe deterioration. The 
corrosion of the curtain wall resulted in the bowing of the horizontal 
mullions and thebreakage of most of the smaller spandrel glass panels, as 
well as some of the larger window panels. The Landmarks Preservation 
Committee designated the building a historical landmark in 1982—
noting it as “outstanding for its spatial clarity, scale and beauty of form”—
and allowed for a full replacement, in kind, of the building’s curtain wall 
assembly.20 This “radical facelift” has significant implications for a theory 
of the preservation of postwar modernist architecture.21 It suggests that, 
in contrast to Ruskin’s emphasis on literal materiality, certain buildings 
are characterized less by their physical instantiation than by the concept 
of the design. And therefore, any attempt to preserve and restore such 
buildings must determine its original grammar—the rules of its design—
in order to preserve the meaning of a given structure. The logic of its rules 
will determine the appropriate degree to which restoration and alteration 
can occur without altering the original meaning of the design. Thus the 
entirety of Lever House’s literal glass curtain-wall could be replaced with 
new, updated materials while maintaining the integrity of the initial design. 
The original tinted wired spandrel glass, no longer manufactured, was 
replaced with as close to a match to the original as possible. The original 
steel subframe was replaced with a concealed glazing channel, reflecting 
a state of the art solution in today’s curtainwall technology. Throughout 
the restoration process, the materials were replaced—either in kind or as 
closely as possible—so as to reproduce the quality of the idea.

Manufacturers Hanover Trust

Consider also the Manufacturers Trust Company Building, the 
preservation of which goes even further in extending the original design 
intention. Often seen as the very model of modernism (fig. 2), It was built 
in 1954, two years after Lever House, at 510 Fifth Avenue on the southwest 
corner of West 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue. It is a steel and glass cube 
with an unbroken glass façade featuring a seven-foot-wide circular metal 
bank vault visible from the street. Breaking all modes for bank architecture 
of the time, these elements opened what had been a cloistered world 
more commonly housed behind masonry walls and produced a novel 
relationship between architecture and city. Evoking the claim that the idea 
is paramount, Architectural Forum referred to the building as “the first big 
building truly to fulfill architects’ immaculate drafting board idea of glass 



21

isparchitecture.com

as an invisible material.”22 Particularly notable is the 
sense in which the meaning of the design is precisely 
the appearance of the building’s materiality, rather 
than its materiality as such. In contrast to the 
formidable stone and shuddered fortresses of the 
premodern, the building’s guiding design concept is 
the impression of an extreme, unparalleled lightness. 
“If it is characteristic of the human gesture to signify 
beyond its simple existence in fact, to inaugurate a 
meaning,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “it follows that 
every gesture is comparable to every other. They 
all arise from a single syntax.”23 Almost everything 
in the syntax, or grammar, of the Manufacturers 
Trust building contributes to its meaning, to the 
unparalleled appearance of lightness. Supported by 
eight interior columns set eleven feet from the Fifth 
Avenue building line and twenty feet from the West 
43rd Street building line, the secondfloor concrete 
slab cantilevers off the columns and is set back from 
the clear glass curtain wall façade. Accordingly, the 
main banking areas appear to be contained within 
one forty-foot-high space and the second-floor 
slab seems to float. Both the concrete slabs and the 
external metal skeleton were kept extremely thin, 

Particularly 
notable is the 
sense in which 

the meaning of 
the design is 

precisely the 
appearance of 

the building’s 
materiality, 

rather than its 
materiality as 

such.

“

”

figure 2:

Manufacturers 
Hanover Trust



AP . vol 5 . No 1 . 2020

22

m
a

ha
n

 &
 k

lu
y

te
n

a
a

r

enhancing the building’s appearance of lightness. Finally, cathode tube 
lights concealed behind thin plastic panels dematerialize the surface of 
the ceiling producing an impression of weightlessness. A true landmark 
in the delineation of space—and an arrangement of elements far beyond 
mere existence in fact—its design completely transformed our concept of 
the glass wall creating an entirely new relationship between interior and 
exterior.24

More than a half century after its construction, the building’s striking 
formal clarity and rich history remain. The evolution of the city, however, 
has rendered its technical efficiency and programmatic relevance 
obsolete. 510 Fifth Avenue was optimized to the standards and ideals 
of its day. But by 2010, its original owner had closed its bank branch, 
the building’s technological innovations were long outdated, and it no 
longer met the standards of contemporary architecture. In 2012 SOM 
adapted the building for retail, allowing old forms to meet the demand 
for new functions. Beyond the mere replacement of the structure’s 
existing materiality, the adaptation required more significant changes that 
would work within the logic of the original concept. By means of subtle 
architectural alterations that tailor the space for an alternate purpose, they 
preserved the formal ingenuity of a unique and historic architecture while 
simultaneously producing new relationships between architecture and city. 
Drawing on archival research and guided by the original design intentions, 
SOM preserved the building’s architectural meaning by preserving or 
restoring its primary elements including the glass curtain wall facade, the 
vast luminous ceilings, the Bertoia-designed screen, the white marble piers, 
and the celebrated circular stainless-steel vault door. The renovation and 
restoration of its glowing ceilings and polished plate glass façade brilliantly 
maintain the building’s lucid grace and almost complete erasure of the 
threshold between architecture and city.25

To adapt the building for new uses, the architects integrated entrances 
into the building’s east façade, divided the first floor to allow for additional 
tenants, and rotated the escalators to run parallel with the new partial-
glass demising wall. By preserving the original architecture while adapting 
certain of its features for programmatic change, the renovation produces 
a kind of urban monument, one that is simultaneously both retrospective 
and prospective. On the one hand, the building’s preservation brings forth 
layers of accrued implication deposited by time and human experience 
into contemporary urban life—almost Victorian in its materiality. On the 
other hand, the vitality of adaptive reuse lies in its essential engagement 
with the precise demands of the present. It allows for an architecture 



23

isparchitecture.com

that takes on new and disparate functions thereby 
producing new meanings. It directly mediates 
between past and present in an ever-changing 
world of shifting values—and, in this instance, it 
is precisely by virtue of this juxtaposition of past 
and present that the mutual inflection of elements 
bestow significance on one another.

United States Air Force Academy

The idea of preserving architectural intent reached 
an apex in 2016 with Polaris Hall, SOM’s addition 
to the United States Air Force Academy campus 

(fig. 3). With a scope far beyond that of Lever 
House or Manufacturers Hanover Trust, the project 
sought to extend the extreme rigor of the original 
concept into a completely new structure. It found 
in the depth of the initial concept the possibility for 
a building that would preserve the meaning of the 
original while begetting new meaning, born of the 
established relationships between already existing 
elements. This, in extreme contrast to the literalism 

figure 3: Polaris 
Hall



AP . vol 5 . No 1 . 2020

24

m
a

ha
n

 &
 k

lu
y

te
n

a
a

r

of the premodern Romantics, implies a theory of preservation at its most 
speculative, in which we locate the maturation of a future in the fecundity 
of the present. Its original design concept contained futures within its 
logic, allowing for precisely the kind of addition conceived almost a half-
century later. 

Begun in 1954 after the establishment of the United States Air Force 
Academy by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the project is located at an 
elevation of 6,500 feet along the foothills of the Rampart Range of the 
Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Given the scope of the project—both a 
university and flight training academy, nine buildings in total—the concept 
not only addressed individual buildings but both the natural landform and 
the interrelationships between buildings.26 By creating artificial terraces at 
the ridge crest with a series of concrete retaining walls, the plan allows the 
spaces between buildings to open into the larger landscape, maintaining 
the expansive character of the site.27 The buildings in the Cadet Area—
sited on the highest ridge and the symbol of the Academy to the public—
were nestled into the mesa, allowing the structures’ monumentality to be 
apparent from outside the complex while maintaining a human scale and 
smaller perceived-size from the pedestrian level. The entire area is based on 
a seven-foot module that produced the relationships and proportions of 
the buildings throughout. It produced the sizes of the beams and structural 
bays in the Cadet Quarters, as well as the width of the rooms, windows, 
spandrel panels and the detailing of the facades. Delineated rows of marble 
tile on the Terrazzo produce gridlines that reflect the module, a twenty-
eight-foot organizing grid. The module organized the buildings and the 
space, but never restricted them resulting in “an extraordinarily sensitive 
composition of built and natural forms.”28 The corners of the grid were 
intentionally left open and implied, creating breaks in the horizontal plane 
that mirror those on the vertical plane, in the upper level loggias and height 
drops of the Academic Building and Cadet Quarters. The lengthwise 
visual momentum of the buildings—themselves floating on pilotis above 
open space—elevated above its surrounding terrain produced sensations 
of expansive soaring. Set against this backdrop of horizontality and the 
dramatic vertical peaks of the Rampart Range, the Cadet Chapel—the 
focal point of the Cadet Area—is intentionally distinct. Visually separated 
from the Court of Honor by its unique surface treatment, its wide ramp, 
and its dissimilar landscaping, the Chapel functions as the virtuosic 
punctum of the composition.

A half-century after its opening, the United States Air Force Academy 
sought an addition to its campus. Serving as an education and research 



25

isparchitecture.com

center and situated opposite and offset from the 
Cadet Chapel, Polaris Hall functions as the new 
home of the Academy’s Center for Character 
and Leadership Development. Built in 2016 and 
designed by SOM, the addition’s puzzle-like fit is 
as if the idea of the building were embedded within 
the concept of the original design. And in a sense, 
it was. It is a future that grew out of the outline and 
fecundity of the initial design. It is in this sense that 
the addition of Polaris Hall preserves the original, 
articulating the survival of its concept in another 
form.

Given the sensitivity necessary in adding to the 
sacred ground of the existing Academy, the Air 
Force proposed a competition between the three 
principal offices of SOM: San Francisco, Chicago 
and New York. The design jury consisted of Air 
Force officials Lt. General John Regni and Lt. 
General Ervin Rokke, architecture historian and 
critic Joan Ockman, Cornell University School 
of Architecture dean Kent Kleinman, and Robert 
Nauman, whose On The Wings of Modernism is 
widely considered to be the standard work on the 
architecture of the Air Force Academy. SOM began 
with a site visit and the design process took shape 
immediately. Weaving through the surrounding 
hills and valleys to approach the existing campus, 
the buildings came in and out of sight as a kind 
of dramatic foreshadowing of the intensity of 
experience induced upon arrival. Seen as a kind of 
ancient citadel recalling a modern Acropolis, the 
monumental scale of both site and architecture 
produced an almost spiritual effect. The low, long 
orthogonal lines and overwhelming consistency of 
the architecture stood in stark contrast to the raised 
rugged mountaintops and expansive blue sky of the 
surroundings. Significantly, the team noted that the 
architecture is raised on pilotis throughout to create 
cinematic, framed letterbox views of thenatural 
landscape. These framed views, moreover, align with 
the grid of the campus that is everywhere present, 

   This, in 
extreme 

contrast to the 
literalism of 

the premodern 
Romantics, 

implies a theory 
of preservation 

at its most 
speculative, 

in which we 
locate the 

maturation of 
a future in the 

fecundity of the 
present.

“

”



AP . vol 5 . No 1 . 2020

26

m
a

ha
n

 &
 k

lu
y

te
n

a
a

r

inscribed in the very ground on which the cadets march. It was this visit to 
the site—and the attendant recognition of its monumental, quasi-spiritual 
character—as well as what SOM saw as the inescapable necessity to engage 
with the logic of the existing grid, that began the process of conceptualizing 
Polaris Hall.

The SOM design team underwent a period of sustained research into 
the existing architecture of the Air Force Academy as well as the self-
understanding of the institution it houses. It became clear that the discipline 
of the existing architecture—the omnipresent grid, the perfect orthogonal 
lines, the exactness of framing—corresponded in important ways to the 
discipline of the cadets. And central to the Academy’s mission (as to its 
crest), embedded in its conceptual framework like the buildings in the 
terraced plinth, was the Polaris star. The brightest star in its constellation, 
Polaris is known as the North Star, and functions as a symbol of the core 
values of the Academy. SOM used this guiding symbol as the basis of 
their design, seeking to embody Polaris by means of architecture. The 
idea to create a structure that emerged directly from the gridlines of the 
original thickened, rectilinear landscape with a skylight aligned toward 
Polaris came early. The initial design of the campus addition resembled a 
telescope, a long shaft extending diagonally from the ground toward the 
sky. To complement the telescopic form, SOM considered a collaboration 
with the artist James Turrell, with whom SOM had already collaborated 
on two other academic buildings. An intermediate design review with 
Air Force officials, however, caused a subtle but significant change.29 
Concerned that the initial design could be too easily read as a military 
instrument of violence, the design team added volume to the thin shaft, 
extending its base to encompass the entire form. This allowed for a more 
iconic, wing-like shape while bringing light and air into the entire space. 
The logic of the design follows almost naturally from its origin point of 
North Star alignment: its sunken form allows for clear views at ground 
level, glass demising walls bring the skylight as far as possible into the 
building, and the structure aligns the existing grid with the diagonal angle 
of Polaris.

The final design, a 105-foot glass-and-steel skylight aligned toward 
Polaris—the Academy’s metaphorical guiding principle—emerges almost 
inevitably from the existing landscape. Like the Academic Building and 
Cadet Quarters, its auditorium protrudes into the Terrace level mimicking 
the stepped terraces of the original design. It follows the straight lines of the 
campus, preserves crucial sight lines and adheres to the original masterplan 
grid. It references the materials of the original campus including the colorful 



27

isparchitecture.com

Murano glass tiles that line the entry walls and the 
granite for the main exterior stairs which was cut 
from the same quarry used for the Cadet Chapel in 
1954. Its structure, diagonal steel plates composed 
in a triangular grid calibrated to resist lateral forces, 
directly alludes to the Chapel’s triangular repetition. 
The meeting and seminar rooms surrounding the 
central space below the Terrace level are comprised 
of glass storefronts adapted to the campus’s seven-
foot grid. And yet the building provides its own 
additional metaphors. Its protruding skylight works 
as a metaphorical moral compass, a reminder of 
the Academy’s core values. The size and shape 
of the oculus align precisely with the North Star, 
signifying the Academy’s guiding values. It serves 
as a source of natural light, and creates a precise 
optical alignment with the respondent’s seat in 
the Honor Board Room, where investigations into 
the cadet honor code take place. The details of the 
building mirror the logic of continuity and break 
found in the horizontal momentum of the site plan. 
Shaped like an aircraft tailfin, the building eschews 
the muscularity of the Cadet Chapel, preserving the 
campus’s existing hierarchy of importance.

An open, transparent nexus of interaction, 
the terraced levels of the building accommodate 
gatherings at a variety of scales and levels of formality. 
Its glass-walled collaboration rooms surround 
the central space emphasizing and encouraging 
collaborative, forward-looking research. The entirety 
of the largely transparent structure is an architectural 
interpretation of the Academy’s moral aspirations 
more generally, aspirations of communication, 
transparency, and openness. Embedded within 
the constraints of the original campus design, 
Polaris Hall converts morality, sincerity, implicit 
hierarchies, and guiding principles into physical 
spatial conditions. Revisiting, renovating and 
adding to architectural icons requires that the 
original narrative be considered. And the revisiting 
engenders its own narrative, related to and born 

     Polaris 
Hall, however, 

actively 
reinterprets 
the original, 

extending and 
adapting the 

idea of its grid, 
its hierarchy, 

and its 
materiality into 

a bridge that 
bonds past and 

present.

“

”



AP . vol 5 . No 1 . 2020

of—but different from—the original.30 Polaris Hall, for example, can be 
seen as a kind of secular corollary to the original Cadet Chapel; a temple of 
research and learning more adequate to the cultural mores of the twenty-
first century. In this sense, it is a project that exists in the unique, liminal 
space between past and present, a portal connecting one to the other.

It is this unique condition that the practice of adaptive reuse engages 
more broadly. Its ability to preserve an existing building while replacing 
materials (Lever House), repositioning the program (Manufacturer’s Trust) 
or adding to the original (Polaris Hall), challenges certain widely accepted 
notions of historic preservation. Because of modernist architecture’s 
unique focus on the rigor of concept, its preservation requires a shift in our 
understanding of what it means to preserve, which has typically focused on 
the preservation of the literal. In the case of Lever House, for example, the 
very materiality of the original object was wholly replaced while retaining 
its Landmark status, thereby shifting the framework of what it means 
to preserve modernist architecture. In a kind of response to Theseus’s 
Paradox—the famous thought experiment in which the ship of Theseus, 
the mythical king and founder of Athens, has been completely replaced 
over time thus questioning whether the restored ship is the same object 
as the original—the renovation of Lever House expresses a determinate 
position. The complete replacement of its curtain wall assembly suggests 
a radical break in how we approach the historic preservation of modernist 
architecture. And just as the founder-hero of Athens is associated with 
major cultural transition and the establishment of a new social order, the 
preservation approach to Lever House, 510 Fifth Avenue and Polaris Hall 
heralds a new and radical approach to the practice of preservation more 
generally.

Viollet-le-Duc’s attempt to recreate an original intention based primarily 
on an imagined fiction, while a radical approach for its time, foregoes any 
meaningful connection between past and present, as if existing on opposite 
sides of an unbridgeable gulf. Polaris Hall, however, actively reinterprets 
the original, extending and adapting the idea of its grid, its hierarchy, and 
its materiality into a bridge that bonds past and present. Merleau-Ponty 
claimed that in a successful aesthetic object, its meaning does not exhaust 
itself in the moment that has occasioned it, but remains as an exemplary 
type and survives in other situations in other forms and in other times. 
The United States Air Force Academy does exactly that. The depth and 
originality of its original conception outlined a future in its origin. The 
rigor and logic of the design almost included within it the birth of Polaris 
Hall. It instituted a world unto itself pregnant with transformations to 

m
a

ha
n

 &
 k

lu
y

te
n

a
a

r

28



29

isparchitecture.com

come. “History,” Merleau-Ponty reminds us, “is 
the maturation of the future in the present, not the 
sacrifice of the present to an unknown future.”31 
The Air Force Academy was decidedly not sacrificed 
to an unknown future. The fecundity of its original 
design inaugurated an institution. Its extreme rigor 
and depth of intention established a future within 
the logic of its present; a present that called for 
and made possible its next iteration. Rather than a 
complete departure from the initial design, Polaris 
Hall is the maturation of the original conception of 
the Air Force Academy campus into an inevitable 
future.

endnotes

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language 
and the Voices of Silence,” Signs, trans. Richard C. 
McCleary (Evanston, Ill., 1964), pp. 39-83. The 
original essay in French, “Le Langage indirect et les 
voix du silence,” was first published in Les Temps 
Modernes in 1952 and was included in Merleau-
Ponty, Signes (Paris, 1960).
2. As Ada Louise Huxtable, the dean of American 
architectural criticism, writes in The New York Times 
in 1968, “What preservation is really all about is the 
retention and active relationship of the buildings of 
the past to the community’s functioning present.” 
Ada Louise Huxtable, “Where Did We Go Wrong” 
in Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? 
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 
223.
3. Ibid. Notably, the work of Merleau-Ponty is 
at the heart of some of the most important art 
criticism of the 20th century, in particular the 
writing of Michael Fried whose seminal essay “Art 
and Objecthood” was published in Artforum 1967. 
He cites Merleau-Ponty throughout his writing, 
and “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” 



AP . vol 5 . No 1 . 2020

30

m
a

ha
n

 &
 k

lu
y

te
n

a
a

r

in particular. See Michael Fried, “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” 
Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 1998), 28-31.
4. The paper does not claim that SOM architects were explicitly reading 
Merleau-Ponty’s writing. The claim, rather, is that Merleau-Ponty’s 
understanding of how meaning is produced by the interrelationship of 
parts can help us think productively about the early work of SOM and 
what it means to preserve that work today.
5.Huxtable, “Where Did We Go Wrong,” 223.
6. Ibid.
7. So Merleau-Ponty writes, “The primary operation which first constitute 
signs as signs, makes that which is expressed dwell in them through the 
eloquence of their arrangement and configuration alone, implants a 
meaning in that which did not have one, and thus—far from exhausting 
itself in the instant at which it occurs—inaugurates an order and founds 
an institution or a tradition.” Ibid. p. 7. Michael Fried further echoes 
this sentiment in his description of the English sculptor Anthony Caro: 
“Everything in Caro’s art that is worth looking at—except the color—is in 
its syntax.” Commenting later on these lines, and citing Merleau-Ponty’s 
essay in particular, he writes, “I associated the notion of syntax with that 
of abstract gesture, but what I saw was that the entire expressive weight of 
Caro’s art was carried by the relations among the girders, I- and T-beam 
segments, and similar elements out of which his sculptures were made, not 
by… the industrial, modern-world connotations of his materials.” Fried, 
“An Introduction,” 29.
8. This approach is notably different from the more standard approach 
to Merleau-Ponty within architecture which prioritizes Merleau-Ponty’s 
writing on phenomenology. For an interpretation of Merleau-Ponty and 
the role of phenomenology in the rise of postmodernism, see Jorge Otero-
Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the 
Postmodern, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
9. Bunshaft joined SOM in 1937 where he remained for more than forty 
years as lead design partner. He is credited with ushering in a new era of 
modernist skyscraper design and corporate architecture.
10. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: George Allen, 
1903), 244.
11. Ibid., 177.
12. See, for example, Charles Dellheim, The Face of the Past: The Presentation 
of the Medieval Inheritance in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge 



31

isparchitecture.com

University Press, 1982).
13. William Morris, “Preface,” The Nature of Gothic 
(Kelmscott Press: London 1892, p.i).
14. William Morris, Philip Webb, et al, “Manifesto 
of the Society for the Protection of Ancient 
Buildings,” first published 1877, accessible on 
the society’s contempoary website: “The SPAB 
Manifesto” at
https://www.spab.org.uk/about-us/spab-manifesto, 
accessed 10 Oct 2019.
15. Ibid. For discussion of these lines, see Andrea 
Elizabeth Donovan, William Morris and the Society 
for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (Routledge: 
London 2008), pp. 24 ff.
16. Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 
“Restoration,” from Dictionnaire Raisonné de 
l’Architecture Française du XIe au XVIe Siècle 
(1854-1868), English translation as On Restoration 
(Sampson Low, Marston: London, 1875).
17. See, for example, Kevin D. Murphy, Memory 
and Modernity: Viollet-le-Duc at Vézelay (Penn State 
University Press, 1999).
18. Landmarks Preservation Commission 
(November 9, 1982); Designation List 161, 
LP-1277.
19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language 
and the Voices of Silence,” 67.
20. Ibid.
21. Suzanne Stephens, “The restoration of New 
York City’s Lever House is not so same-old, same-
old, as architects SOM and William T. Georgis 
demonstrate,” Architectural Record, March 2003, 
Vol. 191, Issue 3, p. 122.
22. Landmarks Preservation Commission October 
21, 1997; Designation List 285 LP-1968. 
According to Nathaniel Owings, the designers “were 
encouraged to come up with whatever popped into 
their heads, and the history and tradition of banking 



AP . vol 5 . No 1 . 2020

32

m
a

ha
n

 &
 k

lu
y

te
n

a
a

r

be damned. Nathaniel A. Owings, The Spaces in Between: An Architect’s 
Journey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 103.
23 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 
68. 
24. Architectural Forum, “Modern Architecture Breaks through the Glass 
Barrier [Manufacturers Trust Co. Branch, N.Y.].” Architectural Forum 
101 (December 1954): 104-11.
25. For additional background and context to this project (510 Fifth Ave), 
see Evan Bindelglass, “LPC Chair, Top Architects Review NYC’s Adaptive 
Reuse Projects”, New York Imby (Dec 23, 2015), at https://newyorkyimby.
com/2015/12/lpc-chair-top-architects-review-nycs-adaptive-reuse-projects.
html/, accessed October 10, 2019.
26. Robert Bruegman, Modernism at Mid-Century. The Architecture of the 
United States Air Force Academy (University of Chicago Press: Chicago 
1994), 47.
27. As Hegel points out in his Aesthetics, “Works of art enchant us not 
because they are so natural but because they have been made so natural.” 
G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford 
University Press, 1975), 164. The artificiality of the landscape is yet another 
articulation of the project as willed intention. Architectural Forum declared 
that the architects “shaped the slopes as powerfully as the Babylonians, 
the Incas, and the Greeks once did.” Architectural Forum, “The Air Age 
Acropolis”, Architectural Forum 110.6 (June 1959), 158-65.
28. Bruegman, Modernism at Mid-Century, 53.
29. Meeting attendees included Lt. General Regni, Dr. Rokke, Colonel 
(ret) Tom Berry, and Colonel Ackerman.
30. As Nicholas Adams writes in Casabella, “it respects everything around 
it and yet it offers something completely original.” Nicholas Adams, 
“Polaris Hall, Center for Character and leadership Development, Air Force 
Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado,” Casabella 871 (March 2017).
31. The logic of the present unfolds into its future. “It is as if each step 
taken called for and made possible another step, or as if each successful 
expression prescribed another task to the spiritual automation or founded 
an institution whose efficacy it will have never finished experiencing.” 
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 
54.


