Witold Rybczynski's Blog, page 36

FANTASY FACTORIES

Oliver Wainwright writes an excellent article on architectural education in The Guardian. He is particularly good describing the distortions that have accumulated in the so-called academy. Here are some highlights:

Wiry contraptions hang from the ceiling, while globular fungal forms nestle on tables between the spidery legs of 3D-printed creatures. A post-apocalyptic confetti of scalpel blades, empty Pot Noodles and cans of Coke is scattered among this landscape of foreign objects, while a sleeping bag pokes out from under a desk – perhaps with someone still in it.

Attending final presentations as an external critic, it has been striking quite how far students are marshalled under the prescriptive dogma of their tutors in a lot of schools, producing projects with astounding graphic flair, but with a tenuous grip on reality, and often little sign of a critical position. Taught by the same people who mark their work, many students said the safest thing was to keep their heads down and follow the prevailing agenda – or else literally pay for the consequences.

With all energies directed towards the climax of the final exhibition – conceived as a salesroom for students and tutors alike – the emphasis is too often weighted on creating a dazzling polished product, rather than the rigour of the process of getting there. Seductive alien imagery trumps the perceived banality of buildings, with the visual cacophony masking the lack of underlying spatial ideas.

 The common retreat into introspective dreamworlds can be directly correlated against the dissolution of the architect’s powers, which are increasingly superseded by specialist consultants for every stage of the process.

 No one has the answer yet, but at least students’ plaintive pleas for relevant teaching are finally being taken seriously – and they may soon have an alternative to costly years trapped in fantasy factories.

 

SAVE THE STACKS

I am lending my voice to those who are calling for a reconsideration of the plan to demolish the stacks beneath the Reading Room of the New York Public Library. While it is true that these stacks are not generally open to the public, they are an integral part of this extraordinary building, a Beaux-Arts design but truly a machine for reading in. As a writer and researcher, libraries–especially public libraries–remain for me special places. Library stacks, even more than reading rooms, are their symbolic heart. I think that one of the things that drew me to writing was the experience of wandering the stacks of McGill’s old Redpath Library, an Erector set of steel shelves, glass-block floors, and low ceilings, clanging steel spiral stairs, murky light, and the smell of old paper. In those days, entering the stacks was a rare privilege reserved for graduate students. I remember the ever-present feeling of surprise whenever I found the book I was looking for, the mysterious LCCN numbers hand-lettered on the spine. And then discovering something even more interesting farther down on the same shelf.

PROBLEM SOLVER

New (left) and old (right) at the Gardner.

I visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston the other day. I had been there before, but not since the new addition, designed by Renzo Piano. Piano has become a specialist at adding to prominent buildings (Ronchamp, the Morgan Library, the High Museum, and soon the Kimbell Art Museum) and I was curious how he would respond to this rather eccentric museum–a Venetian palazzo in New England. At first glance, the new addition, clad in a green rain-screen, is distinctly odd. It seems to share nothing with its historicist neighbor. But it grew on me. I think that’s because Piano’s architecture has a certain inevitability; when there is a problem, he solves it, when there isn’t, he doesn’t. This needs saying for so many architects today put their energy into dramatically solving aesthetic problems of their own devising, which often results in complicated and eccentric buildings. The Gardner addition is neither. It neatly solves the problem of connecting to the palazzo by a) keeping its distance, and b) aligning the glass link with one of the cloisters, which produces a new entry sequence that actually improves on the original. I particularly liked the back of Piano’s building: ordinary moves but done with a light touch and a razor-sharp intelligence.

THE OTHER STYLE

Louis Sullivan, Gage Building

The first international style in architecture was not the white-box style of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius but Art Nouveau, modernism’s predecessor and in many ways its aesthetic and philosophical opposite. Art Nouveau flourished from 1890 to 1910, and along the way it produced a surprisingly large number of masters: Gaudí, Hoffmann, Horta, Mackintosh, Plečnik, Sullivan, Van de Velde, and Wagner. And that’s just the leading architects; there were also painters, designers and craftsmen: Beardsley, Klimt, Lalique, Moser, Tiffany. Thirty years is a good long run as architectural fashions go, indeed, the International Style lasted barely that long, nevertheless, modernist apologists have always pooh-poohed Art Nouveau, promulgating the view that “the demise of Art Nouveau was attributable to some fundamental internal flaw,” as Peter Kellow writes in a recent issue of American Arts Quarterly. The modernist apologists were understandably defensive; nobody would ever put a Gropius architectural fragment in a museum, as they would the work of Sullivan and Horta. Moreover, the anti-rationalism of Art Nouveau flew in the face of “scientific” modernism. Yet a quick glance at subsequent history reveals that Art Nouveau was the harbinger of a significant strain of modern architecture, visible in the work of Scharoun, Mendelsohn, Poelzig, the late Wright, and surviving today, though without the exquisite details, in the work of Gehry and Hadid. Though there was a brief revival of Art Nouveau, at least in graphic design, during the psychedelic Sixties, an architectural revival seems unlikely. But you never know. As Kellow writes. “Art Nouveau buildings are surely some of the most beautiful ever designed. Not necessarily the best, but the most beautiful.”

TWISTED THINKING

Cayan Tower, Dubai

SOM’s 75-story Cayan Tower in Dubai now has the dubious honor of being the tallest twisted tower in the world. According to the designer, one of the aims of this complicated exercise was to produce a “memorable”  form. It is memorable, since we have become used to orthogonal high-rises. I haven’t seen the Cayan Tower, but I have seen Calatrava’s so-called Turning Torso in Sweden. It is striking from a distance, but closer-up the chief impression–not a particularly pleasant one–is of many parallelogram-shaped windows. It is as if a Miesian curtain wall had gotten too close to the fire.

Sant Francesc

 

I took this photo in the spring of 1967, in the village of San Francisco on the Balearic island of Formentera where I was living at the time. The wall in the background is the church of Sant Francesc Xavier, an eighteenth century building, fortified against attacks by the Barbary pirates who periodically descended on the island. The mesh above the court must be there to keep the soccer ball in bounds. I assume that the taller figure is that of the local priest, or brother, acting as a referee, as he is the only one wearing street shoes. I took this with a Leica M3, I think. Like many architecture students (I had just graduated) I was a devotee of sports cars (which I couldn’t afford–my first car was a VW bug, though later I graduated to a Mini Cooper) and cameras (which I could). So what do I like about the photo? Volumes in sun and shade–the Corbusian trology–boys and play, the moment frozen forever; it is the world of a 24 year-old architect on the edge of life.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

Whenever I hear of complaints about the makeup of the architectural profession, whether  it concerns race or gender, I think of a comment by my old teacher, Norbert Schoenauer. He observed that a disproportionate number of the architects working in the housing field in Canada were either Jews or immigrants. He cited Irving Grossman, Jack Diamond, Peter Dickinson, Oscar Newman, Sandy van Ginkel, Andre and Eva Vescei, and himself. Schoenauer surmised that since housing commissions were less lucrative, they were neglected by established architects, and hence became an opening for “outsiders.” Incidentally, the same was true in the US, think of Emery Roth, Clarence Stein, Bertrand Goldberg, Percival Goodman, and Morris Lapidus. Or Albert Kahn (an immigrant as well as a Jew), who built his practice on designing factories, another neglected field;

 

Social connections have always been a big part of a successful architectural career. In the early part of the twentieth century, WASP clients tended to hire WASP architects–Burnham, McKim, Hastings, Cram, Platt, Pope, Delano, Atterbury. This started to change when European immigrants (some of whom were also Jews), came to the fore: Schindler, Neutra, Mies, Gropius, Breuer, Belluschi, Sert. When Louis I. Kahn began his career, he joined forces with Oscar Stonorov, another immigrant, and designed mainly housing, but by the 1960s, he began to get institutional commissions, and became the leading architect in the US. For the first time, many of the the most prominent names in American architecture were no longer WASPs: not only Kahn, but also Gordon Bunshaft, Max Abramovitz, Minoru Yamasaki, I. M. Pei, Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, Robert A. M. Stern, Cesar Pelli. This shift was less due to open-mindedness, although that is a part of the story, as to a change in the nature of the architectural clientele. Yes, talent is important, but you also have to follow the money.

SAD ENDS

Trent University

Ron Thom (1923-1986) is not a name any longer familiar to many, but in the 1960s he was one of Canada’s leading architects, second only to his fellow Vancouverite, Arthur Erickson. Like Erickson, Thom started small, designing prize-wining houses in a woodsy, modernist style that became associated with the West Coast. Like Erickson, he had difficulty translating his exquisite personal designs into the world of large, corporate commissions, and the arc of both architect’s careers contains more tragedy than triumph. Nevertheless, Thom produced at least two masterpieces of collegiate architecture, Massey College (1963) in Toronto and Trent University (1963-79). Both are unusual in being inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, at a time when most people consigned the master’s work to the dusty shelf of history. They are doubly unusual in looking back to the young Wright of Midway Gardens and the Imperial Hotel. Perhaps it was Thom’s lack of formal training (he went to art school and studied painting) that enabled him to find something fresh in these 50-year-old buildings. Sadly, his later work did not fulfill the promise of these masterworks. Like Louis Sullivan, Thom died young (Thom was 63, Sulivan 68) of alcoholism.

 

Sullivan and Thom’s sad ends are exceptions in the world of architects. According to Vasari, Raphael, who died at only 37, succumbed to excessive love-making, which is a bitter-sweet end. Usually, when architects die before their time they do so thanks to disease (Richardson, Mendelsohn, Kahn, Saarinen, Stirling). Violent ends are rare: the great Gaudí was killed by a streetcar, Stanford White was murdered by a jealous husband. Most architects have lived long lives, productive until the end (I wrote about this in Slate). I was once told of a Viennese architect who comitted suicide when a prominent government building he built was discovered to have no stairs. But surely that is an apocryphal story. Wikipedia lists only nineteen “architects who committed suicide,” although the only widely recognizable name is that of the great Borromini, who suffered from depression.

GOD’S HOUSE

Notre-Dame du Raincy, Auguste Perret, arch.

In an article in the current issue of Design Intelligence, the architect and Notre Dame professor, Duncan G. Stroik writes that the design of contemporary  megachurches, which he characterizes as “non-architecture,” leaves much to be desired. It’s hard to argue with that (see my Slate slide show on megachurches here). But then Stroik goes on to equate megachurches with modernism, whence he elides into the classicist’s standard litany of the failings of modernist architecture. “Gone was the need for human scale and proportions, natural materials, historical elements, and the classical understanding of civic order,” he writes. I am not sure what he means by “natural materials,” but presumably concrete does not qualify, yet Auguste Perret’s all-concrete Notre-Dame du Raincy, an early classic, is a modern reinterpretation of the Gothic. I don’t know that Gaudi had a classical understanding of civic order, but Sagrada Familia shines with his deep religiosity. So does Fay Jones’s Thorncrown Chapel, which incorporates natural materials and human scale.

First Church of Christ Scientist, Bernard Maybeck, arch.

Stroik similarly exaggerates when he writes that Wright, Le Corbusier, Aalto and Mies “did very few churches.” It is true that Mies designed only the rather forlorn chapel at IIT, but Le Corbusier built three churches, and Wright built no less than six places of worship: Unity Temple, Unitarian Meeting House, a Greek Orthodox church, Congregation Church, Beth Sholom Synagogue, and a chapel at Florida Southern University. As for Aalto, he designed six churches as well as two funerary chapels (one unbuilt). I have not seen his transcendent church at Imatra, but I have seen Wright’s Beth Sholom, and it is a numinous space. So is the dark cave of Ronchamp. I recently re-visited Bernard Maybeck’s First Church of Christ Scientist in Berkeley. While this exceptional design is hardly a paragon of modernism, neither is it bound by tradition. But it is a moving and much loved place of worship.

I AM A MEMORIAL

The book launch of Civic Art, a history of the first hundred years of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, was the occasion for the Charles Atherton Memorial Lecture at the National Building Museum, delivered this year by Thomas Luebke, the current secretary of the commission. In the course of his talk, Luebke made an interesting observation: commemorative memorials in Washington, D.C. have become increasingly influenced by other media, specifically photography. When the Lincoln Memorial was completed in 1922, Daniel Chester French’s statue of the president was the sculptor’s interpretation of his subject (the head was based on a cast that French had taken while Lincoln was still alive), and in due course the seated figure became a national icon. When the Marine Corps Memorial was unveiled in 1954, it consisted of a giant statue based on the AP correspondent Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima. Instead of creating an original work, the “sculptor,” one Felix de Weldon, simply appropriated an already famous image. The photo, not the memorial, was the real icon. More recent commemorative works, such as the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, have been similarly based on photographs. Likewise the current version of the proposed memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower. Why does this matter? Memorials that simply mimic another medium lose much of their power; they are more like billboards than sacred markers. Robert Venturi once proposed  that a civic building should be designed as a simple box with a blinking sign on top saying I AM A MONUMENT. One is never quite sure how seriously to take Venturi’s offbeat pronouncements, but the current crop of photographic-inspired memorials suggests just how thin the joke really is.