Architecture

Architectural education differs from other creative fields: art students paint, ceramics students throw pots, film students film, but architecture students can’t build, they can only design. Nevertheless, ever since the Ecole des Beaux-Arts instituted the atelier system, the design studio has dominated architectural teaching. Never mind that this simulation of practice is actually very limited: there is no client, sometimes not even a site, programs are simplified, cost is rarely discussed, and construction is accorded a back seat. Moreover, design juries are generally composed exclusively of architects, rarely are engineers, developers, or lay people included. Little wonder that architects become accustomed to treating design as if it could be isolated from the outside world.

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An architect friend reminded me of an extraordinary octagonal house in Natchez, Mississippi. Longwood was built just before the Civil War for Dr. Haller Nutt, a cotton planter, by the Philadelphia architect, Samuel Sloan. Construction was interrupted by the war (the Philadelphia craftsmen simply went home), and after Nutt’s death in 1864 construction stopped altogether. Although the brick shell and verandas were completed, only the basement was ever finished inside. Sloan’s plan is remarkable, since by the judicious placement of the verandas he manages to create two ranges of rooms (there were to be 32 rooms in all).

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I recently heard from owner-builder Marvin McConoughey of Corvalis, Oregon, who with his wife built their own house in the 1980s. I was impressed by their ambition (the house is about 2,500 sf), and by their dedication (it took six years). My wife and I spent three years building our own house—which I thought was seriously pushing the limits of both our sanity and our conjugal well-being.

Oh, and the McConoughey house is circular in plan! What is it about round houses that fascinates people? Inigo Jones designed several octagonal houses (although as far as we know he did not build any) and Jefferson built a famous octagonal house at Poplar Forest.

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Fonthill Castle, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, is rarely included among the great country houses of the Gilded Age. This extraordinary house is not designed by an architect, it does not follow one of the accepted styles of the period, and it is just, well, too weird. I can’t think of an American country house that looks like a fortified manor house, not even San Simeon—the closest is Sir Edwin Lutyens’s Castle Drogo in Devon. Fonthill was designed and built between 1908 and 1912 by Henry Chapman Mercer. Like many country-house builders,

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Why are so many LEED-certified buildings all-glass? It seemed to defy logic. After all, no matter how much you can reduce artificial lighting by using daylight, the insulation value of glass is negligible compared to solid insulated walls, and anyway there are many overcast days and dark winter afternoons. It is even  more puzzling when an all-glass building is shaded. First you wrap it in glass, and then you wrap the glass in something else. I always suspected that this was more about announcing “I am a green building” than about actually conserving energy. And now it’s official.

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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to All!

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I’ve been reading David Watkin’s Morality and Architecture and I’m struck by the parallel that he draws between modernism and totalitarianism. Now, the conventional story, told and re-told by advocates of the International Style, was that modernist architecture was a moral force, not only opposed to (bad) nineteenth-century Beaux Arts architecture, but also to Nazism and Fascism. This claim was lent credence by the fact that so many leading modernists—Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Eric Mendelsohn, Marcel Breuer—had fled Nazi Germany. That Le Corbusier happily offered his services to the rightist Vichy regime in France,

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Last week I re-watched Roman Polanski’s 1966 film Cul-de-Sac. Lionel Stander and Donald Pleasance are first-rate, but they share star billing with Lindisfarne Castle, which is the location of this one-setting film. Lindisfarne is a sixteenth-century castle that was restored and converted into a country retreat by Sir Edwin Lutyens, whose austere architecture contributes greatly to the tense atmosphere of the film. It reminded me how few movie director’s have exploited outstanding architecture. Joseph Losey set his version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1979) in and around Vicenza, and made full use of Palladio’s Villa Rotonda.

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