Architecture

Harvard’s Fogg Museum, a Colonial Revival building at 32 Quincy Street, reopened five years ago after Renzo Piano’s major expansion, or “reboot” as The Guardian called it. The other day I had a free hour and I spent it in the Calderwood Courtyard of the old/new building. The architect of the original museum, Charles Coolidge of Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch and Abbot (H.H. Richardson’s successor firm), modeled the cloister-like arcades on the loggia of a sixteenth-century canon’s house in Montepulciano, designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Elder. Admittedly, the modeling is very loose, more like a stylized memory,

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The organizers of the  competition to design a replacement spire for Notre Dame Cathedral, “even more beautiful than before” in President Macron’s words, might take a lesson from an incident that happened more than 300 years ago. In 1681 the architect Christopher Wren was commissioned to build a  bell tower for the quadrangle of Christ Church College in Oxford. The original tower had never been completed. The college had been founded by Cardinal Wolsey 150 years earlier, and had been built  in the  castellated Late Gothic style that was then popular but which was now long out of fashion. Wren was the country’s leading classicist.

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The heart-wrenching sight of Notre Dame de Paris in flames was a reminder that fire is the great enemy of architecture. So are earthquakes. The third enemy, ever since 1687 when the Venetians destroyed the Parthenon, is wartime bombardment.  The Paris fire is also a reminder of what a weird hybrid structure Gothic cathedrals really are. The ancient Romans roofed their basilicas and baths with concrete vaults (the Pantheon with a dome), and the Byzantines used thin domes and vaults of brick. Over time, builders lost these skills and Romanesque cathedrals were roofed with exposed timber rafters like big barns.

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I have written crtically in Zócalo of LACMA’s decision to demolish its old museum. “Why does Los Angeles, which has little enough history, feel the need to keep reinventing its surroundings?” I asked. That was almost five years ago. Now we read that the LA county board of supervisors has finally given its approval and the new building will go ahead. I am not a fan of Peter Zumthor’s design. Apart from its rather simple-minded concept it does not look like it will be a sympathetic place to look at art. LACMA has not released any plans,

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Blair Kamin, the architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, recently made this wise observation about the latest crop of urban buildings: “Glass usually works best when it operates in counterpoint to richly articulated walls of masonry. When glass becomes the context, it often struggles to match the quality and character of limestone, granite, brick and terra cotta.” In other words, the first generation of all-glass buildings benefitted from their masonry neighbors (Pei’s John Hancock Tower, across from Richardson’s Trinity Church comes to mind). Today, not so much. Our downtowns are dominated by all-glass boxes, even cities like Washington,

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Last October the Philadelphia Museum of Art re-opened its restaurant. It is designed by Frank Gehry, whose firm is doing a major do-over of the museum. I thought I should take a look and we went there for lunch. The small (75 seats) restaurant, somewhat mysteriously titled Stir, is inauspiciously located behind a frosted glass wall off a banal corridor—hardly an elegant setting. The PMA describes the restaurant decor as having an “ebullient Gehry touch.” I suppose that is a reference to the heavy trellis made of curved laminated Douglas fir beams that is suspended in the middle of the room like some sort of woodsy Calder mobile.

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