Architecture

SKETCHING

Architects have always travelled with sketchbook in hand. Partly it’s a way of recording interesting places, but more importantly, it’s a way of seeing. The opposite of point-and-shoot, sitting and drawing is a leisurely way to absorb one’s surroundings. My friend Laurie Olin, a lifelong travel sketcher, has been publishing collections of his sketches, grouped by country; four years ago France Sketchbooks and recently In Italy, both from ORO Editions. Olin’s sketches are more than attractive impressions—although they are that—they also reflect a landscape architect’s practiced eye, being full of detailed notes and observations.

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THE END OF ARCHITECTURE?

I got an email request the other day. The sender had asked ChatGPT “What are the best articles about architecture written since 1990?” and the third recommendation, after two essays by Koolhaas, was “The End of Architecture?” by Witold Rybczynski. According to the bot, “In this provocative article published in 1996, Rybczynski reflects on the state of architecture at the end of the 20th century and questions whether the discipline has reached its limits or if new directions are emerging.” Stirring stuff. Could I send a link to the article, my correspondent asked? He had been unable to find it online,

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MAKE A GLASS

In the past, when a “master” was recognized he usually became an influence (Bramante, Palladio, and Michelangelo or, Oud, Corbusier and Mies). Today, while we recognize masters, we seem unable—on unwilling—to learn from them.

Or maybe it is a misplaced emphasis on originality. I still remember my very first design assignment in school. I admired Marcel Breuer’s houses, so my first stab at design was an imitation. I was told in no uncertain terms that this was not the correct way to proceed. I thought of this the other day when I was listening to an interview with Bret Stephens,

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YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN

I’ve been writing about Planting Fields, a Roaring Twenties estate on Long Island’s North Shore, Great Gatsby territory. The house, an impressive Tudor pile, was designed by Walker & Gillette in 1918-22; the garden was laid out by Olmsted Brothers. Like the more than five hundred country retreats that were built on the so-called Gold Coast during that era, it was inspired by the British country house, think Brideshead or Downton Abbey. But while the American versions of manors, chateaux, and villas, are beautiful architecturally, they are hollow representations of an unattainable ideal. These country family seats lasted less than one generation before their sprawling grounds were subdivided and sold off,

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THE WISDOM OF EXPERIENCE

I was recently listening to an online interview with Bret Stephens. Speaking admiringly of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke, the New York Times columnist referred to Burke’s approach as “the wisdom of experience rather than the wisdom of theory.” While this pithy observation describes liberal politics, it struck me that it could equally be applied to architecture. At its best, this is an art of the possible, that is, what has worked rather than what should work. That is why architects in the past generally studied a widely accepted canon—the accumulated wisdom of experience.

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INHERITANCES

A while back I wrote a blog on the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art’s indiscriminate use of “classical” and “traditional.” More recently I’ve been writing an essay about the origins of the American campus and the Collegiate Gothic style. I was reading the chapter on “Educational Groups” in The American Vitruvius, Werner Hegemann and Elbert Peets’s “Handbook of Civic Art,” published in 1922. It’s clear that at that time classicists did not consider Gothic to be an acceptable style. “Some recent designs for the grounds of colleges and similar institutions have abandoned both American tradition and the classic forms from which American tradition is derived and have elected Gothic and Elizabethan forms instead,

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UNSTICKING

“What is to be done?” my friend asked. We had been discussing the rather low current state of architecture, countless glass boxes, undisciplined and arbitrary designs, a profession at sea. We have been here before. Because fashion is an unavoidable aspect of architecture—not the main thing, but always lurking in the background—architecture does not evolve steadily like science or technology, it swings back and forth and occasionally gets grounded. That happened in the United States in the late nineteenth century, and it took a Richardson and a McKim to shake it out of its lethargy. Something similar happened in the 1970s,

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IRONY

Describing the Königliches Schloss, the rebuilt imperial palace in Berlin, Michael J. Lewis wrote recently in The New Criterion: “It is not so much a recreation of the palace as a workmanlike scale model of the original, placed on the original site, and with something of the gift that Robert Venturi gave to historic preservation, which is a saving leaven of self-aware irony.” This is a useful insight: irony is a way for modernists to deal with the past without actually acknowledging its primacy. But was Venturi’s “leaven of self-aware irony” a gift or a poison pill?

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