Architecture

THE VIEW FROM DOWN HERE

“The best metaphor for getting older,” Twittered Paul Goldberger recently, “all the hills are steeper, but the views are better.” That sounds about right, although from where I stand—and increasingly sit—the views are not always what they were. I was brought up on Sixties jazz, for example, and I can’t help but agree with with the late Frank Zappa’s pithy assessment, “Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.” I remember when there was just one telephone company, you didn’t actually own your home phone, and it never, ever broke down. And I remember when cities were real places rather than tourist attractions.

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PUT IT BACK

The tragic fire at the Glasgow School of Art, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s masterpiece, raises anew the question: How to rebuild? In a thoughtful blog, George Cairns of Melbourne’s RMIT, who has studied the building in detail, points out that many undocumented changes were made during the building’s construction, so it will be impossible to recreate what was there. In addition, the inevitable demands of modern fire security will likely alter the original design. Rather than try to rebuild Mackintosh’s design, Cairns argues for “great architects to be invited to design a worthy intervention that will breathe new life into the school.”

I’m not so sure.

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JUST SAY NO

Reed Sparling is with Scenic Hudson, an environmental organization opposing plans by LG Electronics to construct a corporate headquarters atop the Hudson River Palisades. LG’s architect, HOK, proposes an 8-story slab that critics, such as Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times, maintains will despoil the scenic beauty of this National Natural Landmark. “LG is receiving the blame for constructing this building, and rightfully so,” writes Sparling in an email. “But does/should an architect have moral or civic responsibility to say no if a potential design threatens highly valued (and irreplaceable) natural resources?” It’s a good question.

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PENCIL AND SCALE

Marco Velardi invited me to contribute to a small exhibition called Source Material, that he was organizing with Jasper Morrison and Jonathan Olivares during this year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan. “We request from you an object of personal value; a reference, keepsake, object, that has informed, provoked, and stimulated your work,” is what he wrote. I sent a pencil and a scale. Here is what I wrote:

I have used many tools as an architect—T-squares, triangles, compasses, protractors, and ruling pens—but the essential tools for me remain a pencil for drawing and sketching, and a scale for measuring.

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HEALTHY ARCHITECTURE

A recent article on the impending demolition of the Coler-Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island by the architect and photographer Charles Giraudet raises an important question. The Goldwater portion of the hospital (originally called Welfare Hospital) opened in 1939. It was designed by Isadore Rosenfield, a Harvard educated Russian immigrant who was the Chief Architect of the Department of Public Works and in charge of New York City’s $100 million hospital building program. The architecture is modernist, with Art Deco motifs, and a chevron plan that presages Louis Kahn. As Giraudet, who has been documenting the empty buildings prior to their demolition,

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HOBSON’S CHOICE

In the public debate over Frank Gehry’s design for the Eisenhower Memorial, there have been frequent calls to scrap the current design and hold a national design competition, open to all. Again at the recent National Capital Planning Commission meeting that “disapproved” Gehry’s proposal, the claim was made that national competitions are the way that Washington, D.C. memorial designs have always been chosen. Let’s look at the historical record.

Washington Monument: in 1836, public competition won by Robert Mills.
Grant Memorial: design competition won by Henry Merwin Shrady, sculptor, and Edward Pearce Casey, architect.
Lincoln Memorial: an invited two-man competition between John Russell Pope and Henry Bacon,

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AN ARCHITECT’S MEMORIAL

P1010440The other day, I walked by the memorial to Richard Morris Hunt that stands on Fifth Avenue, next to Central Park. Not many architects get to have a memorial. The only other one I have seen commemorates Andrea Palladio, a lifesize statue in a small square in Vicenza. Hunt’s is more elaborate:  a bronze bust of the architect is set in an exedra that includes two female statues, one representing Architecture the other Art. The sculptor was Daniel Chester French; the architect, Bruce Price. The inscription reads: “To Richard Morris Hunt, October 31, 1828 – July 31,

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THE GASTRONOMIC ANALOGY

juliachildbThe WTTW documentary movie on Driehaus prizewinner Pier Carlo Bontempi, “A Taste for The Past,” begins with food, a lunch in the architects office in Parma. The analogy between architecture and cooking has always struck me as compelling: they both combine practicality with taste, they both transform physical materials, and in both the eater/user is at the center of the experience. Food needs to be cookable (buildable) and edible (comfortable). There is innovation in cooking—nouvelle cuisine, foams, fusion—yet all cuisines have a base that, for most people, remains the foundation of everyday eating.

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