Architecture

ALL THAT GLITTERS ISN’T BRONZE

P1000214I went to see the new National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C. The building isn’t open to the public yet so I could only see the exterior. Yet because of its location on the National Mall this is one building whose exterior appearance is key. It’s the last structure on the north side of the Mall, down the hill from the Washington Monument. From a distance, the museum has a nice scale and an evocative form. The corona shape has always seemed symbolically right to me, recalling both traditional Yoruba tribal art and a Brancusi sculpture.

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BOOKIA

book 2_edited-1One reviewer of How Architecture Works suggested that readers should have a iPad handy when they read my book so that they could refer to images of the buildings that are mentioned in the text. The book has photos, but they are black and white, and not large, the usual format for a trade book. Now the publisher Mimesis has solved that problem. The Korean edition of the book is illustrated with beautiful color photographs, many taking a full page, and in some cases (Salk Institute, Centre Pompidou, Bilbao Guggenheim) a two-page spread. Mimesis is the art-book arm of Open Books,

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SUNDAY ARCHITECTURE

serveimageI recently watched an interesting lecture on YouTube delivered by Dietmar Eberle at the 2013 World Architecture Festival in Singapore. Eberle is the principal of the Austrian architectural firm Baumschlager Eberle. During his talk he referred metaphorically to Weekday Architecture and Sunday Architecture. The former are the places where we spend most of our lives, the places where we live, work, and shop. The latter, by contrast, are the special buildings that we use on weekends: museums, concert halls, casinos, and of course places of worship. In the past, “Architecture” was synonymous with Sunday Architecture,

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NO-DRAMA OBAMA

There has been much excitement in the Twittersphere concerning the appointment of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects to design the Obama presidential library. A no-drama president has picked no-drama architects is the gist of it. No drama? Putting an 8-story blank wall on 53rd Street, as they did in the American Folk Art Museum is nothing if not dramatic. So is designing a skylight in the form of a glass box, then theatrically cantilevering it out at each end, as they did in the new Barnes Foundation. A less well known building, Skirkanich Hall at the University of Pennsylvania presents a half-blank brick wall to the street,

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TRUMPED UP

serveimageCampus buildings, if they were Classical in style, used to display their names in Roman lettering incised into the entablature; Collegiate Gothic buildings made do with medieval script. In either case the lettering was discreetly integrated with the architecture. No more. A growing trend in university buildings, especially high-rise buildings, is to display the name at billboard scale (thank you Robert Venturi). This started with medical buildings, but I have noticed other campus buildings sprouting overblown signs (the LeBow College of Business at Drexel is illustrated here). What drives this disturbing practice which gives university buildings the appearance of motels or casinos?

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PACESETTERS

In April 1970 the Historical Society of Chestnut Hill, an old garden suburb of Philadelphia, organized a public panel to discuss the future of their community. The venue had to be changed to accommodate the 800 people who showed up. I suspect that the audience, which included many students, was drawn less by the subject than by the panelists: Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, and Romaldo Giurgola. The local newspaper referred to them as “three of America’s foremost architects” and “today’s pacesetters.” Kahn was already a national figure; Venturi had built little and was probably best known for Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,

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PHENOMENA

I came across the following passage recently.

There have always been dazzling personalities that flashed out of the surrounding gloom like the writing on the wall at the great king’s feast; but they are not manifestations of healthy art. They are phenomena. The sanest, most wholesome art is that which is the heritage of all the people, the natural language through which they express their joy of life, their achievement of just living; and this is civilization,—not commercial enterprises, not industrial activity, not the amassing of fabulous wealth, not increase of population or of empire. These may accompany civilization,

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MOUNT CUBA

serveimageThe other day we drove to Mount Cuba, a horticultural center in Delaware. The forest garden is part of an estate built in the 1930s by Lammot du Pont Copeland and his wife Pamela, a branch of the mighty Delaware family. We went to look at the trillium garden, but I was also impressed by the house, a very large Colonial Revival mansion that was completed in 1937. The beautiful brick architecture was exquisite, simple to the point of distillation. The design was the work of Victorine and Samuel Homsey. Samuel (1904-1994), a native of Boston, graduated from MIT and met and married Victorine du Pont (1900-98),

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