Architects

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,

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The work of Pei Cobb Freed was never that exciting, at least not after Pei retired, but the firm produced serious, well-executed modernist designs. Nothing to sneer at. So what is one to make of its latest project, 1045 Avenue of the Americas, a 28-story office building overlooking Bryant Park? A “modern hourglass-shaped structure” is how the New York Times described it. A “tepid Frank Gehry wannabe” would be another way of putting it. With the Beekman Tower, Gehry raised the bar, or perhaps moved the hurdle, and so we get this. It reminds me of a building on the University of Pennsylvania campus,

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I regularly get announcements from architects’ publicists announcing new buildings. Sometimes the proposed design is part of the announcement, sometimes it is merely the appointment of the architect that is considered “news.” But is it? If (insert your favorite architect here) has won a commission, well, good for them, but most of us are really only interested when a building is actually built, not in the pretty pictures. Robert Hughes once wrote that slides are to real art as phone sex is to real sex. Computer-generated drawings are like that, too. Having said that, it is true that some unbuilt projects have been influential in the history of architecture.

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There are many things that can be said about Donald Trump’s apparent presidential bid, but one cannot say that his background in real estate makes it unprecedented. We have had presidents who were engineers, storekeepers, actors, soldiers, and community organizers, and yes, at least one developer. Quite a distinguished one. Although the idealized image of George Washington is of a farmer and soldier, he was also a major land developer. Trained as a surveyor, early in his career he took part in a land company that controlled half a million acres west of the Alleghenies. When he was about 40,

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Earlier this week the architect Bing Thom and I had a public “conversation” at the New York Public Library, on the occasion of the launch of his new book. I have known Bing since we were both architecture students, he in Vancouver and I in Montreal. He was honored this year with the Gold Medal of the Royal Architects Institute of Canada. Thom is unusual in today’s world of branded, globe-trotting architects. He hand picks projects, and often turns down clients. He doesn’t have a signature style. And his buildings demonstrate a sense of craftsmanship and technical innovation that has become rare.

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In a recent interview in the Huffington Post, Boston architectural critic Robert Campbell makes a striking comment: “Since the death of Kahn way back in the 1970s I’m not sure we have a figure of comparable standing.” When I read this I was at first taken aback. Kahn is one of the great American architects, up there with Mies, Wright, Richardson, and Jefferson, but in forty years have there really been no successors? On reflection, I think Campbell is right. No one in Kahn’s generation—not Saarinen, Rudolph, or Pei—quite measures up. Certainly not that great dilettante, Philip Johnson.

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