Architects

The front page of today’s New York Times carries a scathing indictment of Santiago Calatrava’s buildings. The solidly researched article chronicles a record of work that is over-budget, poorly constructed, and in some cases downright dangerous to users. Many engineers have been skeptical of Calatrava’s approach to design, which seems to glamorize structure, while not making a whole lot of structural sense. I had this feeling when I saw his residential tower in Malmö, Sweden, portentously called Turning Torso. The 54-story building on the Öresund Strait is intended to be a landmark, and indeed,

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Conrad was a sea captain, Chekhov was a doctor, but Thomas Hardy is the only famous writer I know who was an architect. Born in modest circumstances, he was apprenticed to an architect as a lad, and worked in London for five year before returning to his native Dorset to devote his time to writing. Max Gate is the name of the house that he designed for himself in Dorchester. He was 45 when he built the house, and he lived there for more than 40 years, until his death–he died in the upstairs bedroom–in 1928.

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I recently watched Intersection, a 1994 flick with Richard Gere and Sharon Stone cast as a husband-wife architect team. We know that Gere is a creative soul–he has long, unruly hair–and that he is financially successful and glamorous–he wears Armani and drives a classic Mercedes 280SL. Stone, oddly cast as an ice queen, runs the business. So far, so good. The setting is Vancouver. The director, Mark Rydell, enlists Arthur Erickson’s Museum of Anthropology (actually almost two decades old, but looking great) as a stand-in for Gere/Stone’s latest architectural triumph. But except for a scene where Gere throws a temper tantrum on a building site,

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Some architecture students had Louis Kahn, or Paul Rudolph, or Jose Luis Sert; I had Stuart A. Wilson. He taught the third-year design studio of McGill’s six-year course. His class was famous–or infamous–as a sort of boot camp. A grueling boot camp: students regularly repeated that year; some dropped out altogether, following his advice that they would be better off in another field. Wilson gave all sorts of design assignments: book jackets, posters, graphics, as well as hands-on exercises conducted in the carpentry shop, his private domain. The semester-long design problem required each student to build a large scale framing model of their project at 1/2 inch to a foot–every stud and joist in place–and to prepare a complete set of construction drawings.

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The death of architect Natalie De Blois, who worked on some of SOM’s best projects in the firm’s heyday–Pepsi Cola, Lever House, Union Carbide–has again raised the question of gender and architecture. We are reminded of many unheralded collaborating female architects–Marion Mahoney with Frank Lloyd Wright, Lilly Reich with Mies van der Rohe, Charlotte Perriand with Le Corbusier, Aino with Alvar Aalto–as if there were a plot to suppress giving proper credit to these women. Yet, the architectural profession, while it is a team endeavor, has always asserted the creative role of the individual practitioner. Architects themselves have fostered this useful illusion.

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Nicolai Ouroussoff called the Cooper Union Building “a bold architectural statement of genuine civic value.” Paul Goldberger described it as “the most exciting, energetic, and well-composed academic building to go up in the city in at least a decade.” James Russell was only slightly more circumspect: “Mayne’s high-wire act may offer an important lesson in creativity for Cooper’s students.” How could so many New Yorkers be taken in? I thought to myself as I looked across Cooper Square at the building. The photographs I had seen did make the building appear bold and exciting. The impression in real life was very different.

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