Witold Rybczynski's Blog, page 44

Two Cultures

During my nineteen years at Penn I have served as a faculty member in two departments, architecture in the School of Design, and real estate in the Wharton School. I discovered many small differences: the real estate faculty is more social, with a Christmas party and an end of year barbecue; architects are less punctual and more long-winded than economists; the business school has better box lunches at faculty meetings. But what struck me most was the differences in academic cultures.

Medical schools do medical research, business schools advance the theoretical state of the art, but architecture schools don’t produce architecture—except on paper, and that work is done almost entirely by students. The design studios are the heart of the program, and the exhibition of student work is a highlight of the academic year. Like most programs, Penn’s department also produces an annual catalog of student work, but one cannot imagine an annual real estate publication devoted to student course assignments. In the real estate department, although all the faculty teach large lecture courses and teaching is what “pays the rent” for the department, the emphasis is on faculty research. Many faculty do all their teaching in one semester, in order to have the second free for their own work.

It is not that the real estate department doesn’t pay attention to teaching, quite the opposite. Attendance is more firmly enforced, assignments are more demanding, and grading is stricter than in architecture, at least in my experience. US News and World Report, which is basically a student consumer guide to university programs, regularly rates Wharton as one of the best B-schools in the country. How do they teach? Real estate faculty teach the same courses, year-in and year-out, refining and updating but not drastically altering the content. The content of architecture design studios, on the other hand, changes from year to year. Who teaches? The real estate department makes minimum use of adjunct teachers, considering them unreliable amateurs. By contrast, in architecture programs there is a long tradition, dating back to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, of practitioners teaching on a part-time basis. In the Penn architecture department, for example, scores of adjuncts and lecturers far outnumber the dozen or so standing faculty.

Architecture curricula are in a constant state of flux, influenced by changing fashions, and torn between the profession’s demands for new skills, and emerging scholarly theories. It would be easy to say that the real estate curriculum is more focused. But the narrow aim of B-schools is to expose students to course content—theories and methods. The goal of a design school is to teach creativity, which is an elusive goal. Especially as talent, rather than merely hard-work, is the key variable—and talent is always in short supply.

Pecking Order

Every year a ranking of schools of architecture comes out, most recently compiled by Design Intelligence. A couple of years ago, I decided to do an unscientific ranking of my own, not based on what architecture deans think, or who employers are hiring, or the current enrollment statistics, but on the long-term product, that is, which schools produce the largest number of really outstanding architects. I compiled a list of the “best” living architects by starting with Priztker Prize winners, AIA Gold Medal recipients, Driehaus Prize winners, and then adding as many names of first-rank prominent practitioners (not academics) as I could think of. I ended up with 55 names. The results? A smattering of regional schools has one or two names, an outstanding alumni such as Steven Holl (Washington), Peter Bohlin (Carnegie Melon), or Michael Graves (Cincinnati). The top four ranks are occupied by (predictably) mostly the Ivy League. Cornell, Princeton, MIT and IIT have 5 percent of the list each; Penn, Columbia and Berkeley have 7 percent each; and mighty Harvard has 10 percent. The surprising result is that fully 40 percent of the names on my list are Yale grads. That is, as scientists say, statistically significant.

Anything Goes

I’m starting to sympathize with Guy de Maupassant, who hated the Eiffel Tower so much that he is said to have regularly had dinner in its restaurant to avoid looking at it.  I’m not talking about the Eiffel Tower, of course, but the Orbit Tower, erected on the occasion of the London Olympics. Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond’s design surely represents the nadir of twenty-first century architecture, structurally feckless (at least to my eye), needlessly complicated, and downright ugly. It puts me in mind of the tower that appeared for the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Its ostensible function was to support the retractable stadium roof, but its actual purpose was to satisfy Mayor Jean Drapeau’s desire for a vertical icon. The tower was unsuccessful, both technically (the roof never worked), and iconically. Mayor Boris Johnson says that the Orbit Tower is “definitely an artwork.” Well, it’s definitely a something.

Precedent and Theory

Architecture, like common law, is based on precedents rather than theories. Great buildings are always, to some extent mysteries, and they must be experienced first-hand if their greatness is to be understood. That is why architects have always travelled in order to examine, measure, sketch, and photograph, in an attempt to plumb the mystery. So it would come as a surprise to most people to discover that almost all schools of architecture teach something called architectural theory. Or, at least, their curricula include courses that bear that name. Since the 1990s, these courses have by and large replaced the comprehensive study of history, which for so long formed the scholarly backbone of architectural education. Since theoretical treatises in architecture are few and far between, and the connection between them and practice is tenuous at best, courses in so-called history-theory tend to rely heavily on philosophy and cultural studies. This has little to do with the pragmatic and messy field of the building arts, as young graduates soon discover. Those who want to be architects will find that the pencil and the sketchbook are more potent tools when it comes to unraveling the secrets of the great buildings of the past.

Ronchamp, 1964

Culture Gulch

The opening of the new Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia has caused some locals to tout the creation of a “museum mile” along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, with the Philadelphia Museum of Art at one end, the Franklin Institute at the other, and the Barnes and the Rodin Museum in-between. Ever since the City Beautiful movement proposed creating grand civic centers, the idea of clustering urban functions has gained traction. But it only makes sense in selective cases. Grouping theaters, which tend to be open at night, supports pre- and post theater restaurants (as in Broadway and the West End); grouping stores allows shoppers to do errands conveniently. Certain commercial activities—garment-making, finance, commercial art galleries, antique shops—gain by proximity. But there is no reason to group religious buildings, for example, or sports venues. Or museums. Nobody spends two hours in a museum and says, “Let’s go next door for another two hours.” Large buildings such as museums and concert halls may be located on important avenues, but that is done for urban design not functional reasons. The only seeming advantage to grouping museums is for the tourist, who doesn’t know the city. But judging from those paramount tourist destinations, London, Paris, and Rome, even tourists enjoy exploring.

Benjamin Franklin Parkway, 1928

Channeling Keisler

My friend Hugh Hartwell sent me a link to a CNN Money story on the late Dick Clark’s house in Malibu. The organic grotto-like home, designed by architect Phillip Jon Brown, is inevitably described by the media as a Fred Flintstone-style house. It really is a version of an idea pioneered by the Austrian architect Frederick Keisler (1890-1965). Keisler was born in what is now Ukraine, studied in Vienna, knew Loos, and was a member of the De Stijl group. In 1926, he moved to New York City, where he lived the rest of his life, working as a window decorator, writing manifestoes, designing visionary projects, teaching at Columbia, and leading the existence of an avant-garde gadfly. His only built work, as far as I know, is the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, a rather beautiful urn-shaped building housing the Dead Seas Scrolls. What I recall is studying his Endless House, whose maquette was exhibited at MoMA in 1958-59. Blob architecture, before the fact. A couple of years later, I built my own version, out of chicken wire and plaster of Paris, as a student assignment. Keisler never realized the Endless House, except in model form. Maybe he should have moved to Malibu.

Our John Soane

Matt McClain for the Washington Post

This weekend’s Washington Post magazine has a cover story on Frank Gehry and his design for the Eisenhower memorial. Philip Kennicott has done a fine job explaining the ins and outs on this only-in-Washington teapot tempest, but what struck me was the wonderful photo by Matt McClain of Gehry in a storage room of his LA studio, surrounded by architectural models. It captures not only the architect’s working method, and the intensity of exploration that the scores of models represent, but also the sense of this remarkable artist in his own world. It reminds me of Joseph Michael Gandy’s 1818 painting of a room piled full with models of all the buildings designed by John Soane, a small figure barely visible in the foreground.

NAMOC

Olympic Park, Beijing

An architectural competition for the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) is currently underway. The site of the vast (128,000 m2) museum is Beijing, not far from Herzog & de Meuron’s Olympic stadium. This promises to be one of the largest and most ambitious museums since the Getty Center and the Bilbao Guggenheim. Judging from some websites, unsuccessful entrants in the first stage included Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture and Ben van Berkel’s UNStudio. Not clear who else competed, but one supposes the usual suspects. Four firms have reached the final stage: Gehry Partners, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid Architects, and Safdie Architects. Three Pritzker Prize winners, and an outlier. Although Safdie has had an amazing year with the US Peace Institute, Crystal Bridges in Arkansas, the Sikh Cultural Center in Punjab, and the Marina Bay Sands complex in Singapore. The winner is expected to be announced shortly.

WAMO

An international competition for the Washington Monument Grounds has attracted more than 500 participants, and the announcement of the six finalists from as far afield as Korea and the Netherlands has garnered attention in the architectural media. The competition is puzzling, because the sponsor is not the National Park Service, which is responsible for the grounds, but a private group with lead sponsorship from George Washington University, Albert H. Small (a real estate developer), and the Virginia Center for Architecture of the Virginia Society AIA. The competition maintains that the grounds are “unfinished,” despite that the Washington Monument (WAMO) grounds have just been handsomely done over by OLIN, a leading firm of landscape architects. Are we to imagine that all this will be ripped up? Apparently so. There appears not to have been a budget for the competition, which is just as well as it is unclear that there is anyone who would actually be prepared to pay for such unnecessary work. As jury member Benjamin Forgey, the late (and longtime) architecture critic of the Washington Post expressed in a sort of dissenting view, “[The site] does not need vast underground facilities and reshapings of the kind proposed in many of these final schemes, even those that are elegantly designed.” This is billed as an “ideas competition” meant to provoke and stimulate discussion. But discussion about what? And to what end? That is less clear.

Catatonic Styles

Ever notice how when people want to be derogatory in referring to a building that uses a traditional style they will use the word “neo,” as in neo-Gothic or neo-Georgian, as if it were not quite the real thing. Instead of  simply saying Gothic Revival, or Georgian Revival. For the history of architecture, starting with the Renaissance, is a history of revivals. Gothic, for example, has been revived continuously, starting even during the Renaissance, and has come back to life regularly as clockwork in virtually every period, right up until the present day. When I mentioned this to Edwin Schlossberg, he thought for a second and replied, “What about the catatonic styles?” Of course, he’s right. Some styles seem impervious to revival. Art Nouveau came back in psychedelic posters, but not really in buildings. Modern styles come back, look at Meier and Le Corbusier’s White Period, or the Case Studies houses today. Sam Jacobs is even leading a small Postmodern Revival. But it’s still hard to imagine a Brutalist Revival (sorry Docomomo). It’s a catatonic style.

Federal Office Building, Columbia, SC. 1979, Marcel Breuer, arch.