This is a tuxedo. It has depth, contrast, and shadow lines from the different materials. Good buildings have depth and contrast from different materials.
This is a tuxedo T-shirt. It is not a tuxedo. The two-dimensional prints are not real. Bad buildings do this when different materials are “co-planar.” Tuxedo T-shirts are funny. Do you want your building to be funny?
Josh refers to the “tuxedo T-shirt” quite often when explaining the rationale behind a design solution. What does he really mean by this? Think about what a tuxedo actually is? A tuxedo is a collection of a few, distinct, three-dimensional elements that contrast one another. Specifically, there is a bowtie made of one material, a shirt of another, and a jacket of another. Each of these three-dimensional items have their own contrasting shape and associated material. The contrast between them creates depth and interest. Each item also has its own function. The function of each item relates to the decision of which fabric is most appropriate for each piece. The shirt is a thinner fabric while the coat is a thicker one. The bowtie is commonly done with an entirely different, contrasting fabric (of color/texture) due to more its ornamental nature.
With a tuxedo T-shirt, all of those different elements are silk screened onto a single piece of fabric to look as closely as possible to a real tuxedo. Although there’s something fun about a tuxedo T-shirt, anyone would agree that a regular tuxedo is far more interesting than a tuxedo T-shirt. This is because of the depth and individuality of each of the different pieces on a real tuxedo. A tuxedo T-shirt has no depth. It is a two-dimensional manifestation of a 3-D object. It is an imposter. It is dishonest. It is a con. It is what is wrong with design.
The tuxedo T-shirt is what happens when materials for a façade of a building are arbitrarily selected without regard to the three-dimensional feature they cover. You wouldn’t expect to see a coat from a tuxedo with one material on the front and a separate contrasting material on the back. It wouldn’t make sense. The coat is one distinct object with one distinct and consistent material. Similarly, if you turn an apple around, you would not expect to see an orange. The materiality of an apple is distinct to the properties of an apple. As you might expect, the stem of an apple is a different material than the skin of an apple. This is because the three-dimensional object, known as the stem, performs a different function than the peel. They contrast each other visually, and they perform a different function. The change in material and shape makes sense.
Buildings use the same philosophy. One part of a building performs a specific function, so that part has a distinct material from other parts that perform different functions. It would not make sense for the corner of a building to have one material on one side but magically change to a different material on another side for no reason. Or even worse, you would not expect a simple flat façade to arbitrarily change to another separate material without any change in the depth between those two materials.
Appropriately selecting materials for the objects we design is part of what we do, and it is also one of our core values. To do our jobs appropriately, we must select materials for the objects (or parts of the building) we design, and it is also one of our required virtues to do this properly, in an obvious manner, and creatively. In order to do our jobs well, we commit to following our core values to guarantee success. We hope you will appreciate our adherence to our standards that we have set for ourselves, and we welcome the opportunity to explain them to you in further detail.
The images below depict examples of tuxedo T-shirts (flat facades) and also examples of more thoughtful facades (with depth) where the materials relate to their purpose and function. You will notice there is no apparent reason whatsoever for the facades on the tuxedo T-shirts to have different materials - they are just “lipstick on a pig” or a decorated shed (the concept coined by famous architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown which means to cover a utilitarian building with decoration to give it more interest than it really has).
If you’d like to learn more about our design process, visit www.josharch.com/process, and if you’d like to get us started on your project with a feasibility report, please visit www.josharch.com/help
A terrible flat facade with no reason for changing siding
There is no reason to change materials near the roof and no reason for the fake thing that sort of looks like a truss at the top
The bumpout changes material and color. That makes sense. Nicely done by Stuart Silk Architects.
The stone at the entry is set forward and contrasts the siding behind that is setback. The roof plane does its own thing. They all have a different purpose, with different material, with different depth.
The dark metal bumpout contrasts the light wood wall with a change in height, width, and depth.
The dark metal trim contrasts the soft warm wood siding
The solid dark upper level contrasts the open glassy lower level. The concrete wall plane recesses back to create more contrast. The concrete wall plane has no other material on it. Although you cannot see the back of the concrete, you know it is concrete. Although you cannot see around the corner of the upper floor, you KNOW it has the same dark siding. The same dark siding runs below, and conceptually, it would also continue on the roof (the same way the skin of an orange covers the entirety of the fruit without an arbitrary change in material.