Architecture

The Charlottesville Tapes is well worth a second read. In 1983, Jaquelin T. Robertson, then architecture dean at the University of Virginia, brought together two dozen architects to a private two-day confab (pointedly, no critics or historians were invited, only practitioners). It was a heavyweight group, a mixture of American, European, and Japanese architects, among them nine future Pritzker Prize winners, and four future Driehaus laureates. Each participant presented one project; discussion followed. The book is an edited version of the conversations. Reading the lively exchanges, one can only reflect on how much has changed since.

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“Tradition does not mean guarding the ashes, but fanning the embers,” observed Benjamin Franklin; similar quotations are attributed to Thomas More and Gustav Mahler. Guarding the ashes puts old fogies in their place, and fanning the embers nicely catches the sense of an active involvement with the past. One looks in vain for such involvement in much of today’s architecture. Too many  architects have embraced novelty as the sine qua non of new work, perhaps under the mis-impression that they are designing products rather than buildings. But while the life of an iPhone is too short for the novelty to ever wear off,

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I like glass as much as the next guy, but enough is enough. Just as the sixties architects went crazy about exposed concrete, architects today can’t get enough of glass. It’s used in the name of transparency, reflectivity, technology, ecology. If you’re a minimalist you like glass because it’s not there; if you’re a techie, you can accessorize it with all sorts of neat details; if you’re a not-very-good architect, glass will absolve you of having to design the facade. And who thinks up those glass details? Glass walls overlapping glass walls; facades that cantilever into this air;

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In his snarky review of How Architecture Works in the Wall Street Journal, Joseph Rykwert (who was a colleague of mine at Penn, something the review doesn’t reveal) quotes the Count de Buffon, Le style c’est l’homme mȇme, to support his view that the choice of a style is a “warrant of personal integrity.” I’m not sure that’s true in personal affairs, after all we dress differently for a morning jog than for the office, but it’s definitely not true in building design. Rykwert admires Mies for building the Farnsworth House in the same steel-and-glass style as his office buildings,

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The words visionary and futuristic are generally used as high praise in architectural criticism. But I’m not so sure. Most architectural visions, whether it’s Mendelsohn, Marinetti, or Sant’Elia have not proved accurate–how could they? Too many unpredictable things change, technologically, politically, culturally. “Cities of the future” generally look quaint, decades on. The most interesting visions are the ones that accept odd blends of past and future, like the dystopian metropolis in Blade Runner, or the techno/medieval Village in the TV series The Prisoner (whose setting was actually Sir Clough Williams-Ellis’s  Portmeirion).

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