Witold Rybczynski's Blog, page 34

NEWS DUMP

The opening credits of Billy Wilder’s 1974 filmed version of The Front Page portray the short, inglorious life of a daily newspaper, from typesetting and printing to being distributed and read. The final frame shows the front page being used to line the bottom of a birdcage; catching bird droppings is all that old news is good for. Today, no news seems to be too old, at least not on the New York Times website. The pleasure of opening a daily newspaper is its freshness, not only the crisp newsprint, but the news itself. Once you’re finished reading, you can throw the paper in the recycling bin with the satisfying feeling of a job well done. That’s what’s so disturbing about reading the NYT online. Bits of yesterday’s news–of last week’s news!–linger for days. It’s nice to have access to archives, but here the archives are mixed in with breaking stories. It feels more like a news dump than a newspaper.

TV ASIDE

It’s not often that politicians have anything penetrating to say about architecture. Even fictional politicians. Especially villainous fictional politicians. Kevin Spacey’s Rep. Francis Underwood, in Netflix’s House of Cards delivers this memorable aperçu: “Money is the McMansion in Sarasota that starts falling apart after ten years; power is the old stone building that stands for centuries.”

TYROS

A recent article in the New York Times points out the youth and inexperience of many teachers in today’s charter schools. In a related Slate piece, Sarah Mosle observes of her three years as a young Teach for America grade school teacher: “I was single, childless, and clueless about even the most basic aspects of child-rearing. My students’ parents seemed like creatures from another planet, remote and distant from the job I thought I was doing. To the extent I understood family dynamics, it was solely from the perspective of the teenager I’d been just a few years before.” There is a parallel here with teaching architecture. It has become increasingly common to hire young graduates, newly minted and fresh out of school, as part-time teachers in design studios. The advantages are obvious: young teachers are motivated, enthusiastic, energetic, and willing to spend long hours in the studio. And since the architect job-market is over-supplied, they are willing to work for less than full-time professors. Having been students themselves recently, young teachers are able to establish an easy rapport with their charges. I remember when I taught my first studio–I was three years out of school and I had exactly one commission under my belt, a summer cottage for my parents. The problem is that the unseasoned teacher tends to perpetuate the fictive atmosphere of the studio: clients and budgets are unimportant, practical concerns can be dispensed with, all that matters is design, the more imaginative the better. Of course, this makes the studio much more fun than dealing with the harsh and unglamorous matters that make up a large part of architectural practice. No wonder that young graduates are shocked–and often discouraged–by the exigencies of the real world. Nobody prepared them for it.

WHAT’S IN A NAME

Michael Kimmelman in a New York Times article on a new Italian winery near Florence, identifies the architect as Archea. There is no Architetto Archea, it’s a made-up name. While most architecture firms continue to be named John Doe Associates, the use of invented names is increasingly common. There are the mega-practices Aecom and Aedas, the mainstream Ennead (originally Polshek Partnership), cutting-edge SHoP, and the recently disbanded Office dA. Some of the made-up names involve arcane wordplay–Coop Himmelb(l)au, Mecanoo, Asymptote, Arch-Tectonics–and some seem calculated simply to grab our attention, like the Danish firm BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), the London firm, FAT (Fashion, Architecture, Taste), or the Beijing firm, MAD (which doesn’t seem to stand for anything). Pritzker Prize-winner Wang Shu’s firm is called Amateur Architecture Studio; Snøhetta is named after a Norwegian mountain peak. Interestingly, firms practicing traditional or classical architecture, tend to avoid made-up names. Perhaps tricky names are a subtle form of architectural branding: I’m not stodgy, I’m hip, in fact, I’m not a firm at all, I’m a creative force.

There is also a practical reason to adopt a neutral name: not privileging the founding partners by attaching their names to the practice. Most firms change over time (Archea, founded in 1988, now has four principals and eight partners), partners come and go, and in any case, an impersonal name better reflects the collaborative nature of large architectural practices. Or at least, that is the theory. In some cases, the need to personalize reasserts itself. Morphosis was founded in 1972 by a group of architects, although today projects by the firm are usually credited to “Thom Mayne of Morphosis,” a similar status is accorded “Rem Koolhaas of OMA,” and “Joshua Prince-Ramus of REX.” Several years ago the landscape architecture firm founded as Field Operations, began referring to itself as “James Corner Field Operations.” What’s in a name? Apparently, quite a lot.

SO MANY CLASSES, SO LITTLE TIME

École des Beaux-Arts, Atelier André, 1880s

Architectural curricula have changed in the last several decades. First, they are shorter. Architecture, since it concerns creativity, takes time. The original course of study at the École des Beaux-Arts recognized this; you simply kept at it until you were considered ready to leave. Modern architecture programs used to be five or six years. Since they devoted  time to general subjects, this usually meant about four years of intensive architecture study. In the 1970s, most universities followed Harvard’s lead and made a three-year Master the professional degree. The problem was that a BA degree didn’t really prepare students for a career in architecture, so while graduate students might be more mature, they still had to be taught the basics, just as before.  Compressing four years of material into three was made more challenging by the emergence of another trend: elective courses. When I was an architecture student my six-year program was composed entirely of required courses; today 20-25 percent of most programs is elective courses. These courses cover a large range of material, some essential, some peripheral, some downright arcane. Electives are popular with students, of course, and also with teachers, since they allow the teaching of highly focused subjects tailored to the instructor’s own interest or research agenda. Deans like electives because they can be taught by inexpensive part-timers.

But curriculum design is a zero-sum game: teach this, and you don’t have time to teach that. So, with less time and fewer required courses, what has been left out? Architectural history has taken the largest hit, compressed into one quick survey course, transformed into “history-theory,” or just cut out altogether. One of my classes was life drawing, two hours a week with charcoal, easel, and a model; I can’t imagine that many schools require this today. Another was an introduction to sociology–how people behave–important for an architect. Years ago, I taught a required course in specifications; today, that subject is generally folded into a catch-all class in “professional practice.”

Architecture is not the only profession facing the challenge of streamlining. In the 1970s, many American medical schools, in an attempt to produce more graduates to meet practitioner shortages, switched to three-year curricula. Subsequently, many of these schools reinstated a fourth year, but consisting chiefly of electives. It was not an unqualified success. One study of medical education concluded that “A much greater emphasis on educational rigor in all fourth-year courses (especially electives) is necessary to address the reputation for academic laxity and grade inflation.”

What is to be done? Extending graduate architecture programs by a year would be a start. It is not as if there is a shortage of architects–quite the contrary–so if a longer program reduced the number of graduates, that would not be a bad thing. The number of elective courses should be drastically curtailed. Important subjects should be mandatory; peripheral subjects such as furniture design (you can’t learn to design furniture in twelve weeks), should be cut. With a bit of ingenuity, it might even be possible to make room for life drawing.

MAKE A STATEMENT

Craig Ellwood, South Bay Bank, Manhattan Beach, CA (1956)

I came across a term new to me in an architectural magazine today. The writer was speculating about whether Jeff Bezos would have an influence on the design of the new headquarters of the Washington Post. “One question is whether the newspaper’s new owner wants a statement building,” he wrote. A statement building! It struck me as a sad commentary on the present state of architecture that what at one time would have been called simply good design had now been elevated to the status of a “statement.” And a statement of what? The architectural equivalent of a designer label: I am a Gehry, I am a Hadid, I am a Foster? A ratification of the status of the client: I am rich, I am special, I am not run-of-the-mill? Or a corporate message: we value design, we are green, we are on the cutting edge? It is times like this that I miss the certainties of mid-century modernism, when it was sufficient for a building–whether it was a corporate office, a house, or a bank–to merely exhibit structural and functional logic, clean but not labored details, and a modest range of materials. If there was a statement here it was simply “I am modern.”

THE CREATIVE ACT

I recently watched Intersection, a 1994 flick with Richard Gere and Sharon Stone cast as a husband-wife architect team. We know that Gere is a creative soul–he has long, unruly hair–and that he is financially successful and glamorous–he wears Armani and drives a classic Mercedes 280SL. Stone, oddly cast as an ice queen, runs the business. So far, so good. The setting is Vancouver. The director, Mark Rydell, enlists Arthur Erickson’s Museum of Anthropology (actually almost two decades old, but looking great) as a stand-in for Gere/Stone’s latest architectural triumph. But except for a scene where Gere throws a temper tantrum on a building site, there is nothing in this film to suggest how an architect actually creates. On reflection, I can’t think of a movie that does so successfully; not Two for the Road (although Albert Finney is appropriately self-absorbed), not Towering Inferno nor  Sleepless in Seattle, and definitely not Death Wish. Admittedly, it’s difficult to portray cinematically how the various demands of a project come together in the mind of a designer–but Gere staring intently at a maquette doesn’t quite cut it. My gold standard for portraying creativity is the deathbed scene in Amadeus, in which director Miloš Forman manages to capture the mystery of musical composition. Not that what he portrays is necessarily the way that composers compose, but watching Hulce/Mozart and Abraham/Salieri we get an insight into what it might be like to hear music in your head. As for Intersection, it bombed at the box-office, and I’m afraid hasn’t improved with time.

CORPORATE HOMES

Microsoft campus, Seattle

In the midst of the astonishing sale of the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos, a related announcement has received less attention: the newspaper will be getting a new home. Developers have been invited to make proposals, and while the final choice has not yet been made (and given the sale of the paper, who knows?), some of the alternatives have been made public. The architects include the usual megafirm suspects, and the designs are equally predictable–buildings for anybody, anyplace. What a difference when the Chicago Tribune held a well-publicized architectural competition in the 1920s for its home, and Eliel Saarinen, Walter Gropius, and Bruno Taut were among the entrants. That was a time when corporations sought to present themselves to the public through adventurous architecture–think Woolworth, Singer, Chrysler, RCA. Sometimes this strategy backfired (PanAm, CBS, AT&T), but when it succeeded it produced masterworks such as Wright’s Johnson Wax, Mies’s Seagram, SOM’s Lever House, and Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center and the John Deere headquarters. Pepsi Cola, Bell Labs, IBM, and Union Carbide built exceptional buildings, too. In fact, a list of leading mid-century corporate patrons reads like the Fortune 500. One would be hard put to compile a comparable list today. None of our largest new corporations–Google, Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Amazon–would be on it. Exceptions: Facebook has hired Frank Gehry to design an addition to its campus, and Apple is building a high-tech donut designed by Norman Foster. But most of today’s technology companies appear content to occupy the safe architectural middle ground. Is it that buildings really don’t matter to them? Or are they sending the message: we’re not elitists, we’re one of the crowd, we’re just like you. Mr. Bezos, the new boss, could change that.

OFF LIMITS

Andrés Duany takes issue in Architectural Record with Michael Sorkin’s review of Landscape Urbanism and Its Discontents. But the problem with a compilation of 20 essays by many different authors is that it rarely presents a coherent argument, so almost anything you say about such a book is (sort of) true. Although this is a sanctioned new urbanist collection, the contributors present a variety of–sometimes contradictory–views. Some admire the High Line, some don’t; some are still fighting a rear-guard action against the modern movement, some aren’t;  some see landscape urbanism as the enemy, some don’t. Doug Kelbaugh and Dan Solomon take the sensible position that there is room enough for everyone; Jim Kunstler, spirited as usual, calls landscape urbanism a “lame defense of the bankrupt old mandarin ideology,” which is almost as good as Leon Krier’s blurb: “old modernist wine presented in new greenwashed bottles.” Michael Dennis makes a more telling criticism. “I have not seen, or heard of, any urbanism from so-called Landscape Urbanists . . . I have seen some (occasionally) good urban landscape designs, but mostly they are on the edge of urban contexts–waterfronts, etc.” Duany, who is co-editor of this collection, also makes a valid point that Sorkin does not address. All those swales, water gardens, and native plantings, that are a staple of landscape urbanism–and “green” landscapes in general–are invariably off limits to the public, which is forbidden to walk on them. This is in sharp contrast to the Olmstedian tradition, where absolutely no part of a park is inaccessible. That is the great weakness of landscape urbanism; so much of it seems designed to be photographed rather than used.

STU

St. Regis Tavern, Montreal, 1960s.

Some architecture students had Louis Kahn, or Paul Rudolph, or Jose Luis Sert; I had Stuart A. Wilson. He taught the third-year design studio of McGill’s six-year course. His class was famous–or infamous–as a sort of boot camp. A grueling boot camp: students regularly repeated that year; some dropped out altogether, following his advice that they would be better off in another field. Wilson gave all sorts of design assignments: book jackets, posters, graphics, as well as hands-on exercises conducted in the carpentry shop, his private domain. The semester-long design problem required each student to build a large scale framing model of their project at 1/2 inch to a foot–every stud and joist in place–and to prepare a complete set of construction drawings. Wilson insisted that architecture was grounded in construction–”Art, fart” was a favorite saying. He was a relentless design critic, sardonically probing, gruffly puncturing youthful pretense, all the while dribbling cigarette ash onto the hapless victim’s drawing. At the same time he was the most accessible of teachers, always available for long conversations, ready with book recommendations–he seemed to have read everything. These talks often took place late at night, for he seemed to live in his office, which had a sleeping loft. He was rumored to have had several wives, the accumulated alimony obligations accounting for his unusual living arrangement, at least according to student lore which doubtless embroidered the facts.

The custom today is to engage callow adjunct instructors to teach beginning studios. Wilson was 50 when I encountered him. He had started teaching when he was 36, and had years of practical experience under his belt. In the 1960s, he  designed the interior of the St. Regis Tavern on St. Catherine Street, a cavernous space with an undulating Aaltoesque ceiling and hanging Bauhaus mobiles–he called them Doodle Boxes. It was an unexpected setting for a roomful of blue-collar men (taverns at that time were male preserves), noisily drinking Labatt and eating pig’s knuckles. Wilson also conducted sketching school, a two-week summer camp that was required to be taken–twice–by all students. He was an accomplished watercolorist and had exhibited in galleries, although we didn’t know that at the time.

In 1963, my classmate Ralph Bergman and I started a school magazine. The second issue included articles by Paolo Soleri, Christopher Alexander, and Philip Thiel. I asked Wilson if he would write something on programming. The result was “A Sordid Discussion, or Loose Talk on Programming,” a make-believe bull-session on the subject set, of course, in a tavern. “In a corner, seated beside a few beers and torn crinkly packages of barbecued potato chips, a small tense group of architecture types, boys and men, rocked and rolled in their chairs and poked out arms and chins.” The older man, a gruff professor, challenges the motley group of students–Owl, Mop-head, Cool, Turbulent, Passionate, Prim, and Scornful. Just another typical class. Wilson (1912-91) retired officially in 1981, but taught for another decade, a total of 43 years.