Architecture

THE HIGH COST OF HIGH TECH

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the Comcast Technology Center is running $67 million over budget. The 60-story Technology Center (Foster + Partners), currently under construction next to the 58-story Comcast Center (Robert A. M. Stern Architects), is a very expensive building: $1.5 billion versus $540 million for the latter. The Comcast Center was completed ten years ago, so that makes a difference, and the Tech Center will include a 12-story Four Seasons hotel. But the amount of office space is virtually identical, 1.3 million square feet, compared to 1.25 million square feet in the older building,

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A BRIDGE TOO FAR


Reading about Venice’s new Ponte della Constituzione I was reminded—again—of the dangers of architectural experimentation. The bridge, designed by Santiago Calatrava, is full of novelty: irregular steps, illuminated glass treads, and a beautiful but very flat arch. All these innovations have created problems. The irregularly-dimensioned steps cause people to trip, steps make the bridge inaccessible to wheelchairs (a strange-looking mechanical pod has been added), and the flat arch has created structural stresses on the foundations. As for the glass treads—they become slippery when wet, and the glass gets chipped by tourists wheeling their luggage, requiring expensive replacement.

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STREETSCAPE

Passing the entrance to 10 Rittenhouse Square on 18th Street in Philadelphia today I was caught up short. Robert A. M. Stern Architects, who designed the 33-story apartment tower, have done something cunning. The entrance to the tower is distinctly low key, a simple break in a low stone wall, flanked by two piers topped by stone balls. Beyond the break, a short path leads to a glass marquee over the front door. It was the wall that interested me. 10 Rittenhouse Square’s immediate neighbor is the Fell-Van Rensselaer mansion, designed in 1898 by the great Boston firm, Peabody &

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INTUITION

“Intuition has to lead knowledge, but it can’t be out there on its own,” said Bill Evans. “If its on its own, you’re going to flounder sooner or later.” He was speaking to Marian McPartland during a 1979 appearance on her NPR show, Piano Jazz. Evans was talking about the need to respect the basic structures of music, but it struck me that what he said applies equally to architecture. Especially today. Intuition seems to drive design; having set aside knowledge, that is, history, architects are winging it. And, yes, there is much floundering.

Photo: Bill Evans and Miles Davis,

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WE WILL NEVER FORGET

Petula Dvorzak of the Washington Post called me recently and asked me what I thought of a memorial to the victims of school shootings. I’m not keen on the current fashion for memorializing victims, which has became an almost knee-jerk response to any calamity. In my own city, Philadelphia, only a few blocks from where I live, a memorial is under construction. The 125-foot by 25-foot memorial park will commemorate the six people who were killed on June 5, 2013, when a slipshod demolition resulted in a building collapsing on top of a Salvation Army thrift store.

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OFF THE TRACK

“I cannot think of anything more ludicrous than the idea that modernism somehow got off the track and was a monstrous mistake that should simply be canceled out,” wrote Ada Louis Huxtable in The Unreal America. “Revolutions in life and technology can never be reversed.” The last statement is demonstrably untrue—just ask the Russians, the East Europeans, the Cambodians, and the Chinese. Turning back the modernist clock admittedly will be difficult, but the idea that modernism was a monstrous mistake seems to me anything but risible. The suggestion that an industrial age required a different sort of architecture was hardly unreasonable.

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NOT GOOD ENOUGH

Ever since 1969, the American Institute of architects has bestowed a Twenty-Five Year Award that recognizes a “design of enduring significance.” The only exception was in 1970, when no building was found to merit such recognition. And now in 2018 the same. According to the AIA, “Unfortunately, this year the jury did not find a submission that it felt achieved twenty-five years of exceptional aesthetic and cultural relevance while also representing the timelessness and positive impact the profession aspires to achieve.” Really? No building in the 1983-93 window is good enough? Well, perhaps not Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s AT&T Building (1984),

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BRITISH CLASSICISM

Reading a recent monograph on the work of John Simpson, I am struck again by the difference between American and British classicism. For one thing, the former is rooted in a much shorter tradition. Moreover, it is a tradition that is, in a sense, academic. Or, at least bookish. In the first instance it derived from (British) pattern books, which were the main source of information for the early colonial builders. Nineteenth-century American classicism, on the other hand, was chiefly the product of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where many American architects of that period were trained. Although there were many talented self-taught architects such as Stanford White,

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