Witold Rybczynski's Blog, page 47

Hotel Rooms

I have stayed in some memorable hotels—Brown's in London, and Cipriani's in Asolo—but for some reason the hotel rooms I remember best are the ones that were, let us say, sub par. My most memorable hotel experience was in a small town whose name I forget, on the shore of Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. I was visiting a rural development project  in a nearby village. It was the late 1970s, some years before the military coup that devastated this small nation, and while the city was awash in young soldiers, the countryside was quiet. My wife and I checked into a hotel that was like something out of a B. Traven novel: a low building around a patio that contained the toilets and outdoor shower stalls. Our room was pretty basic but quite large, and oddly contained four or five beds. We didn't think much of it and turned in early. Later that night we were woken by the noise of someone—rather  drunkenly—falling into one of the beds. We hadn't realized that the sleeping arrangements were communal. The second hotel room that sticks in my memory was in Idah, in central Nigeria. Idah, then a town of about 20,000, is on the eastern bank of the Niger River. I was there as part of a team of visiting consultants, to devise garbage removal systems for small provincial towns like Idah, whose streets were sometimes impassable because of the accumulated trash. The hotel was the best one in town, well, the only one in town. This time the novelist who comes to mind is Joseph Conrad, in one of his darker moods. Everything in the room—the decrepit easy chair, the air conditioner, the ceiling fan, the electric lights—was broken. There was nothing to do but drink—and make a sketch.

 

Remembering Ken Kern

Ken Kern was an architect who published a series of books in the 1970s starting with the classic The Owner-Built Home, and followed by The Owner-Built Homestead, The Owner-Builder and the Code, and The Work Book. The last, written with his sister Evelyn Turner, a psychologist, is a case study of people who built their own homes and the effect it had on their lives. Stewart Brand reviewed it in The Whole Earth Catalog. "About 80 percent of the couples I know who have built a house or a boat, they build it, then they split up," Brand wrote. "Happened to me too." I was concerned about that, since my wife and I were building our own house (that was 1977—we're still together). I referred to The Owner-Built Home a lot. It is full of practical advice about building techniques, materials, tools, and contains useful references, many of them arcane such as where to get a soil-cement block press, for example or a squat toilet (Kern travelled the globe after graduating from architecture school). I never met him but we corresponded. According to John Raabe, who worked for Kern, the architect-builder died (in the mid 1990s) in one of his own creations. He had just fnished building an experimental dome using slip-formed concrete, and decided to spend a night in it. There was a freak rain storm, and the dome collapsed on its hapless creator. The perils of owner-building.

 

Slumdog Entrepreneur

Jim Yardley has an excellent story in the New York Times on Dharavi, a large Bombay slum. It is not clear exactly how many people live in Dharavi—probably no one is quite sure—but it is reported that there are estimated to be 60,000 dwellings, but since a slum household can be anything from 2 to 20 persons, that is not much help. What is sure is that the slum, while lacking basic infrastructure is a hive of activity. One resident entrepreneur estimates Dharavi's annual economic output is between $600 million and $1 billion. When I was researching slums for a Canadian aid project, I remember an incident that put things into perspective for me. We were walking down a narrow dusty street when we glimpsed a group of young children sitting on the ground in a tight circle. What were they up to, I wondered? When we approached I realized that they weren't playing but working—they were filling and sealing paper sugar packets. The red logo on the packets said "Air India." Although slums, or informal settlements as the international aid community refers to them, are often described as part of an underground economy, that is inaccurate. Like cottage industries in Victorian England they are an integral—and important—part of the mainstream economy.

Rolling beedies (Indian smokes) in a slum settlement in Indore, c. 1983 (Photo: Vikram Bhatt)

 

Architects and Fashion

Michael Graves in his library

Architects have a love-hate relationship with fashion. On the one hand, becoming fashionable can catapult an architect's career, bringing not only recognition but also, more importantly, commissions. But fashion giveth, and fashion taketh away, and becoming unfashionable can stop a career in its tracks. Philip Johnson, always with one finger to the winds of fashion, dealt with its fickleness by embracing it: moving from Miesian modernism, to ersatz classicism, to postmodernism, to deconstructivism. See his compound—architectural zoo?—at New Canaan. But most architects have deeper convictions than Johnson, even when fashion abandons them. Steadfastness can lead to obscurity, as it did to Paul Rudolph, or it can be rewarded, as in the case of I. M. Pei, who remained a modernist throughout the postmodern and deconstructivist periods, and lived long enough to see his steadiness vindicated. Michael Graves, similarly has stuck to his guns. Catching the brass ring during the heady days of postmodernism, he never abandoned his personal style—a stylized version of classicism—despite the general opprobrium with which postmodernism was dismissed by the critics and the academy. Graves has just been awarded the 2012 Driehaus Prize.

Full disclosure: I am a member of the Driehaus Prize jury.

Tales of the City

More than half of the world's population is now urban, a famous factoid. City boosters tend to play fast and loose with this statistic, as if it represents the triumph of the city, and more than half of the world's population now lives in a combination of Manhattan and Singapore. Of  course, they don't. The majority of urban Americans either live in suburbs, or in new cities–Phoenix, Seattle, Houston–whose character is distinctly suburban. Nevertheless, Richard Florida's article in the October issue of the Atlantic segues from global urbanization to the virtues of density, closeness, and human interaction in concentrated cities. The so-called creative classes, he writes, "cluster and thrive in places where the conversation and culture are the most stimulating." This may or may not be true, but the article is illustrated with a two-page map of the U.S. dotted with the major cities. Each city is indicated with its average income. The incomes are high, more than  $60,000 in San Francisco, $54,908 in New York City, and $46,230 in Philadelphia, where I live. Except that the median household income in the City of Philadelphia is actually closer to $30,000. The figures on the Atlantic map are not the average income for cities but for metro areas, which in the case of Philadelphia include the well-to-do suburbs, in which people live and work. I don't know if these suburbs are the scenes of "stimulating conversation," but they are definitely neither dense nor concentrated. Neither is San Jose, Marin, or Palo Alto, or for that matter, the outer boroughs of New York City or northern New Jersey. So people are thriving, just not exactly in the places where we imagine—or would like to imagine.

 

Nude Pei

I. M. Pei's East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. is currently undergoing repairs. The cladding of the 33-year-old building is being entirely re-hung to rectify a problem with the anchors that support the marble slabs, a project that is expected to take four years and cost an astounding $85 million. It's worth taking a look at Pei's denuded building. The familiar triangular prisms turn out to be concrete frames in-filled with brick, quite unlike the effete geometry that we are used to. It is as if a businessman removed his pin-striped suit to reveal a muscle shirt. The robust beams and red brick recall nineteenth-century industrial architecture, a curious but not unwelcome presence on the Mall. It reminded me that Louis Kahn was one of four architects considered by Paul Mellon and Carter Brown (the others were Philip Johnson, Kevin Roche, and Pei). Although Kahn was designing an art museum for Mellon at Yale, he did not get the job. Had he, he might have produced something like the gutsy building that has suddenly appeared on the Mall.