Witold Rybczynski's Blog, page 24

July 30, 2016

SUNDAY ARCHITECTURE

serveimageI recently watched an interesting lecture on YouTube delivered by Dietmar Eberle at the 2013 World Architecture Festival in Singapore. Eberle is the principal of the Austrian architectural firm Baumschlager Eberle. During his talk he referred metaphorically to Weekday Architecture and Sunday Architecture. The former are the places where we spend most of our lives, the places where we live, work, and shop. The latter, by contrast, are the special buildings that we use on weekends: museums, concert halls, casinos, and of course places of worship. In the past, “Architecture” was synonymous with Sunday Architecture, churches, civic monuments, royal palaces. Weekday Architecture was left to vernacular builders. By the early twentieth century, architects had made inroads into Weekday Architecture, and they were designing housing, factories, and department stores. The early modernists went so far as to try and abolish Sunday Architecture, with the result that it was often hard to distinguish a city hall from a warehouse. Today, it feels like we have moved in the  opposite direction: we have abolished Weekdays—as if every day could be Sunday.  Sunday Architecture is what the public expects, what the media covers, and what the schools teach.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on July 30, 2016 12:11

July 2, 2016

NO-DRAMA OBAMA

Skirkanich Hall

Skirkanich Hall


There has been much excitement in the Twittersphere concerning the appointment of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects to design the Obama presidential library. A no-drama president has picked no-drama architects is the gist of it. No drama? Putting an 8-story blank wall on 53rd Street, as they did in the American Folk Art Museum is nothing if not dramatic. So is designing a skylight in the form of a glass box, then theatrically cantilevering it out at each end, as they did in the new Barnes Foundation. A less well known building, Skirkanich Hall at the University of Pennsylvania presents a half-blank brick wall to the street, and in case you miss it, the shiny glazed brick is green, unlike every other brick building on that campus. Skirkanich stands out in other ways; to further call attention to itself it breaks the building line of the street, like a pushy person in a queue. The neighboring Moore School Building (on the right in the photo), which was altered by Paul Cret in 1926, is much more urbanistically circumspect—and much lower key architecturally, after all, its just a workaday engineering teaching building, not a monument. But TWBTA tends to make a fuss when they build, whether it’s a facade or a simple bench. “Look at me, I’ve been designed” seems to be the message. Implicitly this privileges the person doing the designing. But this is exactly not what a presidential library needs; its subject should take center stage.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on July 02, 2016 04:37

June 8, 2016

TRUMPED UP

serveimageCampus buildings, if they were Classical in style, used to display their names in Roman lettering incised into the entablature; Collegiate Gothic buildings made do with medieval script. In either case the lettering was discreetly integrated with the architecture. No more. A growing trend in university buildings, especially high-rise buildings, is to display the name at billboard scale (thank you Robert Venturi). This started with medical buildings, but I have noticed other campus buildings sprouting overblown signs (the LeBow College of Business at Drexel is illustrated here). What drives this disturbing practice which gives university buildings the appearance of motels or casinos? In some cases I suspect it is a demand of the donor, in others it is probably an enterprising dean who is to blame. Universities increasingly advertise on the media, so why not tout your name on a building for all the world to see? Why not a flashing neon sign on the ivory tower?

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on June 08, 2016 12:48

May 14, 2016

PACESETTERS

serveimage

White House (Romaldo Giurgola, arch) 1963


In April 1970 the Historical Society of Chestnut Hill, an old garden suburb of Philadelphia, organized a public panel to discuss the future of their community. The venue had to be changed to accommodate the 800 people who showed up. I suspect that the audience, which included many students, was drawn less by the subject than by the panelists: Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, and Romaldo Giurgola. The local newspaper referred to them as “three of America’s foremost architects” and “today’s pacesetters.” Kahn was already a national figure; Venturi had built little and was probably best known for Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published in 1966, although the house that he had recently designed for his mother had caused ripples in the architectural world; Giurgola was head of Columbia’s department of architecture and his  architectural career was taking off, he had just designed the American embassy in Bogotá. All three had built houses in Chestnut Hill: Kahn the Margaret Esherick house, a little gem; Venturi the Vanna Venturi House, his mother’s house; and Giurgola the Dorothy White House. By curious coincidence all three houses were for single women.


Almost fifty years later the reputations of the “pacesetters” have taken different courses. That of Kahn, who died only four years after the Chestnut Hill panel, has, if anything, grown; his place in history is secure. Venturi’s reputation is harder to assess. Few later projects lived up to the promise of his mother’s house (my favorite is the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London), and the demise of postmodernism didn’t help, despite the architect’s vain attempt to disassociate himself from that movement. Giurgola received the AIA Gold Medal in 1982, but a well-intentioned effort to expand Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum savaged his reputation and he ended up moving to Australia, where he had won a competition to design the national capital. Like Harry Seidler before him, he seems destined to be remembered—if he is remembered at all—as a purely regional star.


Kahn, Venturi and Giurgola are sometime lumped together as belonging to the “Philadelphia School.” That is hyperbole—they were very different sorts of architects. It is said that at the dinner after the Chestnut Hill panel, they hardly spoke to each other. Still, it would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on May 14, 2016 05:41

May 1, 2016

PHENOMENA

Sheraton Huzhou, Jean Nouvel, arch.

Sheraton Huzhou, Jean Nouvel, arch.


I came across the following passage recently.


There have always been dazzling personalities that flashed out of the surrounding gloom like the writing on the wall at the great king’s feast; but they are not manifestations of healthy art. They are phenomena. The sanest, most wholesome art is that which is the heritage of all the people, the natural language through which they express their joy of life, their achievement of just living; and this is civilization,—not commercial enterprises, not industrial activity, not the amassing of fabulous wealth, not increase of population or of empire. These may accompany civilization, but they do not prove it.


This was written by Ralph Adams Cram, the introduction to his Church Building, published in 1899. I read this at the same time as numerous fulsome encomia appeared in the media on the occasion of the death of Zaha Hadid, certainly a “dazzling personality.” She was also, in Cram’s sense, a phenomenon. Like so many leading architects today, her work was personal, eccentric, and idiosyncratic, the very opposite of a natural language, a popular heritage. Not an architecture grounded in a particular place, like Gaudí’s equally eccentric buildings, but global in nature, built in faraway lands for faraway people often of fabulous wealth. Accompanying civilization, but not proving it.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on May 01, 2016 03:42

April 21, 2016

MOUNT CUBA

serveimageThe other day we drove to Mount Cuba, a horticultural center in Delaware. The forest garden is part of an estate built in the 1930s by Lamott Du Pont Copeland and his wife Louisa, a branch of the mighty Delaware family. We went to look at the trillium garden, but I was also impressed by the house, a very large Colonial Revival mansion that was completed in 1937. The beautiful brick architecture was exquisite, simple to the point of distillation. The design was the work of Victorine and Samuel Homsey. Samuel (1904-1994), a native of Boston, graduated from MIT and met and married Victorine Du Pont (1900-98), who had studied at the Cambridge School of Domestic and Landscape Architecture for Women. They set up shop in Delaware, which is where Victorine had family contacts; theirs was probably the first husband-and-wife practice in the United States. In addition to Mount Cuba they were responsible for several building on the nearby Du Pont estate, Winterthur, as well as the Delaware Art Museum. The Museum of Modern Art selected their house design to represent the International Style for the 1938 Paris Exhibition, but they were not modernist converts. “We certainly are not modern if that means following worshipfully the so called functional or international style,” wrote Victorine. “Nor do we follow with blind admiration the great designers of earlier periods. We try to work out each job as a totally separate problem and to divorce from our minds any preconceived idea of style.” Eclecticism is maligned today, but looking at Mount Cuba one can only admire its rigor and sense of conviction.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on April 21, 2016 04:43

April 3, 2016

MEGACITY

serveimageRather silly op-ed piece in today’s New York Times arguing that the mayoralty of Toronto’s Rob Ford, which made most Torontonians—and Canadians—cringe, was actually a sign of a healthy politic. Toronto, like Montreal, has regional not municipal government, imposed, I hasten to say, not by popular choice but by a provincial fiat. The amalgamation of a traditional central city with its surrounding metropolitan suburbs, is virtually impossible to achieve in the U.S., although it is the dream of many American city planners. Such amalgamation, the argument goes, would spread the advantages and burdens of urbanization over the entire metropolitan population, shifting suburban resources to inner city problems. Sounds like a good thing. Except that when the suburbs outnumber the city, you get a “suburban” dingbat like Rob Ford, who managed to get elected as mayor (and re-elected to his council seat), despite his embarrassing behavior precisely because of his pro-suburb, anti-city policies. Ford was a symptom of urban success? I have never read about Toronto’s “livable suburbs,” or about the “suburbs-that-work.” The image of Toronto is precisely that—the image of a city that is dense, well served by mass transit, safe, efficiently managed. Toronto suburbs are not much different from their American counterparts. The Times article compares Toronto to nearby Detroit (talk about a loaded comparison). The latter is a ring of white suburbs surrounding a majority black city. I can imagine what the Times would say about a Detroit regionally governed by a redneck white (suburban) mayor riding roughshod over his predominantly black city constituents? Amiri Baraka could certainly imagine it. Back in 1993 I was on a Wayne State University panel with the late Newark poet discussing urban issues. In my Canadian naiveté I suggested that Detroit might be better off with a regional government—spread the wealth, etc. Baraka exploded. That would simply place city government back in the hands of the white majority, he remonstrated. A ridiculous suggestion. In 1993, a fresh immigrant to the U.S., I was puzzled by his response. Now I take his point.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on April 03, 2016 04:31

March 21, 2016

HOOPLA

serveimageThe newly completed Oculus in Manhattan is not just misnamed (an oculus is a round opening, not a slit) it is misconceived. It is not a question of design, or execution, or cost, but rather of the entire concept. Does a daily commute really require  this level of architectural rhetoric? Even if this were a substitute for Penn Station, it would be a dubious proposition. It made sense for our forbears to celebrate long distance train travel, when railroad terminals really were the “gateways to the city.” Today, that is no longer the case. Even air travel has become a mundane, everyday affair. just look at how plane travelers dress—for comfort, not for distinction. This does not mean that an airline terminal—or a train station, for that matter—needs to be banal, the equivalent of architectural Muzak. But maybe Scarlatti rather than Wagner is in order? I recall my first experience of Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, some thirty years ago. It was a comfortable relaxing (and quiet) place, just right for the jet lagged intercontinental traveler. Does the weary commuter really need Calatrava’s over-heated hoopla? I think not.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on March 21, 2016 05:07

February 18, 2016

MODERNISM 2.0

serveimageMarcel Breuer built his second house in New Canaan, Ct., in 1951. Known as Breuer House II, it served as the family’s home until 1975 when Breuer, then 73, sold the property. The new owners hired Breuer’s longtime associate Herbert Beckhard, to enlarge the house. Over the years the house experienced more changes and was described as “essentially gutted.” By 2005 it was threatened with demolition. New owners bought the house, removed the additions, restored the interior and doubled its size with a large addition designed by Toshiko Mori. The house is currently for sale. I haven’t seen House II in its current state, but I did visit it in 1971. We had lunch with the great man, sitting on Cesca chairs around a square granite table. It was a particular treat since I had always admired Breuer’s houses, which seemed to me the epitome of what a modern house should be: simple, a bit rough—almost crude—uncluttered, less self-consciously arty than Le Corbusier, more livable than Mies. A kind of updated farm house: slate floor, plain wood ceiling, unassuming details. What a difference sixty years makes! Judging from photographs, the interior today is sleek, precise, self-conscious, expensive-looking. Not your grandfather’s modernism.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on February 18, 2016 04:45

January 22, 2016

SENTIMENT

Washington University, St. Louis

Washington University, St. Louis


In September 1900, the office of Walter Cope and John Stewardson (who had died a few years earlier) produced a report in conjunction with their plan for the new campus for Washington University in St.Louis. The report is titled “Explanation of Drawings,” and a large part is devoted to a discussion of architectural style, specifically of Classical and Gothic. The authors argue for the latter (the firm more or less invented Collegiate Gothic), on the basis of cost, adaptability, scale, and appropriateness to an educational institution. They also point out the sentimental connection that exists between Gothic and institutions of higher learning, which evolved side by side in the Middle Ages. “If we ignore true sentiment in architecture we shall have little left,” they add. I realized when I read this that this is precisely what disturbs me about the current fashion in architectural design. Buildings have eliminated all  sentiment. They may be ingenious and complex, but they are so in a way that is hermetic and self-contained. Instead of “looking like” buildings, that is, establishing a sentimental tie with the long arc of history, they merely look forward into an unknown future. Perhaps that’s why they remind me of giant appliances.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on January 22, 2016 04:22

Witold Rybczynski's Blog

Witold Rybczynski
Witold Rybczynski isn't a Goodreads Author (yet), but they do have a blog, so here are some recent posts imported from their feed.
Follow Witold Rybczynski's blog with rss.