Witold Rybczynski's Blog, page 2

A COUNTRY PLACE AND ITS MAKERS

This month sees the publication by Monacelli of Planting Fields: A Place on Long Island. Gilded Age country estates on Long Island’s Gold Coast are not unusual—there were originally 500 of them—but this one is, not least because the house and its 400 landscaped acres have survived, more or less intact, as a public arboretum and state park. I contributed a chapter that tells a fifty-year story of agency and contingency, of strong-willed owners and talented designers, and of the accidental events that interfered with their plans and dreams.

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CHARM AND GRANITE

I was saddened to learn of the death of David Childs (1941-2025). He was the chair when I joined the Commission of Fine Arts, and an intelligent architect and a charming man. Reading the obituaries put me in mind of something I came across while writing The Biography of a Building, about the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, a very early Norman Foster design. Sir Hugh Casson, the dean of postwar British architects, had written a letter of recommendation for the young Foster, who was being considered for the job: “As you have already met him [Foster],

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MAKE ME AN ANGEL

 I’ve been re-watching that excellent TV series, Ozark. The last episode included one of the characters—actually his ghost, there’s a lot of dead people in Ozark—singing a song whose melody was familiar although I couldn’t place it immediately. It was John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery.” The mournful music evoked my Shirley, who loved Prine. I think it was his ironic lack of sentimentality that appealed to her. She also liked Joe Cocker, Randy Newman, Blossom Dearie, anything by Cole Porter. And Janis, whom she heard at Woodstock.

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FUSION ON THE MAIN LINE

The other day I had the opportunity to visit Camp-Woods, a house on Philadelphia’s Main Line. It was built in 1910-12 for James M. Willcox, a banker who would later be president of the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society—and would commission the PSFS Building, America’s first International Style skyscraper. Camp-Woods is definitely not International Style, according to the brief Wiki entry it is Italianate-Georgian. While the architecture is a fusion, that is a misleading description. The architect was Howard Van Doren Shaw (1869-1926), one of the leading residential architects of his day—he was awarded the AIA Gold Medal, a high honor at that time.

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THE PILLAR BOX

I dislike e-cards for Christmas. They are impersonal and seem to say “we couldn’t be bothered.” I still send cards, sometimes handmade, but there is one part of that that always disappoints: dropping them in the mailbox. The USPS mailbox at the corner is a dismal affair, a cheap, ugly metal receptacle that reminds me of a trash can and always makes me feel as if I’m throwing my letters away. I grew up in England, and I still remember the pillar box, made of sturdy cast-iron, embossed with G VI R and a royal crown, and painted bright red.

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A HUNGARIAN ARCHITECT IN AMERICA

I watched The Brutalist yesterday. My reaction? An implausible story poorly told and awkwardly stitched together; the Holocaust connection seemed gratuitous; a ham-handedly written script, the audience actually snickered at some of more pompous utterances of the Guy Pearce character; distracting bursts of portentous music at odd moments; and glitches, like Tóth saying square meters when he knows his audience understands only square feet, or producing the kind of expressionistic sketches that are out of character for a Bauhaus-trained architect—more like something the great Eric Mendelsohn would draw. As for the title, while Tóth was definitely brutalized, it made no sense to me,

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STAINED GLASS

Remember when French premier Emmanuel Macron saw the Notre-Dame fire as an opportunity to modernize the cathedral, and announced an international architectural competition to produce a new, updated roof—a “contemporary gesture,” in his words? And remember when many well-known architects, much to their discredit, applauded the gesture. Macron’s plan was scotched by the almost universal negative reaction of curators, historic preservationists, and the French parliament. Now Macron is back in hot water with his plan to remove six stained glass windows and install modern replacements. The uproar is caused by the fact that the six removed windows were unharmed by the fire,

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HOME ECONOMICS

I recently reviewed an upcoming  book about home economics by Anna Myjak-Pycia, Another Modernism. Home economics is often derided as having been too traditional, to much a celebration of  homebound feminity, yet it had a lasting influence on the way that we live—and especially work—in our homes.  I wrote about the work of Ellen Richards, Christine Frederick, and Lillian Gilbreth, self-styled “domestic engineers,” in Home, and I took it to heart when, shortly after, my wife and I built our own home, the Boathouse (see The Most Beautiful House in the World),

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FROM OUR FOREIGN DESK

Coming soon from Owl Publishing House in Taipei, Taiwan, a translation of The Story Of Architecture and The Driving Machine. Owl has previously published Now I Sit Me Down to Eat, How Architecture Works, Makeshift Metropolis, One Good Turn, Waiting for the Weekend, and Home.

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DO-IT-YOURSELF

“Man Builds House with STONES and LOGS in the Forest.” YouTube is full of bright ideas for building your own house: in a dome, underground, out of ferrocement, or bales of hay, or logs, We promise it will be cheaper, easier, faster. My advice is keep it simple, avoid shortcuts; the old solutions are best, especially for beginners. Building your own home, I mean really building it, without an architect or a contractor, can be stressful. The level of stress will be increased, needlessly in my opinion, by two things.

First, trying to do too much. I remember once visiting a couple who were building their own home.

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