Architects

The architect Jack Diamond (1932-2022) died last week. He was perhaps Canada’s leading architect. Yet no-one would refer to him as a starchitect. “It’s easy to do an iconic building,” he once said, “because it’s only solving one issue.” Diamond’s designs were never one-dimensional. His opera house in Toronto is a traditional horseshoe-shaped auditorium situated within an unprepossessing blue-black brick box whose chief feature is a glazed lobby facing one of the city’s main streets; dramatic, but hardly iconic—very Canadian. At $150 million in 2008, the cost of the Four Seasons Centre was modest as opera houses go, but more important was how the money was spent—on the hall and the interiors rather than on exterior architectural effects.

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Moshe Safdie has just donated his architectural archive of correspondence, drawings, and models, as well as his apartment in Habitat, to his alma mater, McGill University. His is a remarkable career, not least for its long span. Of course Safdie started young, he was only 29 when Habitat—his first project!—propelled him into the limelight. Most architects who experience a break-out project do so at a relatively advanced age—Louis Kahn was 52 when he came to the public’s attention, Frank Gehry was 49. Edwin Lutyens, an exception like Safdie, skipped school and designed his first house at 18, and was nationally known by the time he reached his mid-30s (he died at 74).

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When I was a student at McGill, my friend Ralph Bergman and I started a magazine, Asterisk, actually it was named *. The second issue, this was 1964, included an article by Alexander and the architect B.V. Doshi on designing a village in India. A couple of years later, when I was working on my thesis, another classmate, Richard Rabnett, had come across HIDECS, Alexander’s computer program for ordering criteria in architectural design. It was in FORTRAN, and we laboriously entered our information onto punch cards, although we never could get the program to run (years later I learned that HIDECS was flawed and could not actually run).

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Robert A. M. Stern has just published Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture. This is not a review; I’ve only read the first chapter—on Amazon—which details the author’s childhood. But Stern’s book is not exactly an autobiography; the publisher calls it “a personal and candid assessment of contemporary architecture and his fifty years of practice.” In fact, architectural memoirs are few and far between. With the exception of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famously unreliable An Autobiography, I only know of two modern examples, Nathaniel Owings’s The Spaces in Between: An Architect’s Journey (1973),

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