Architecture

Catatonic Styles

Ever notice how when people want to be derogatory in referring to a building that uses a traditional style they will use the word “neo,” as in neo-Gothic or neo-Georgian, as if it were not quite the real thing. Instead of  simply saying Gothic Revival, or Georgian Revival. For the history of architecture, starting with the Renaissance, is a history of revivals. Gothic, for example, has been revived continuously, starting even during the Renaissance, and has come back to life regularly as clockwork in virtually every period, right up until the present day. When I mentioned this to Edwin Schlossberg,

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Extreme Makeover

 

Saint Nicholas Eastern Orthodox Church is located in Springdale, Arkansas. Its architect, Marlon Blackwell, told me the story. The congregation had bought a piece of land for their new church that included a three-truck metal garage. Having a very limited budget, the congregation asked him to convert the garage into a church. The unlikely result is an extremely  modest building that successfully confronts a neighboring interstate highway, accommodates the liturgical requirements of the Orthodox rite, and manages to create a strong architectural presence in the process. The exterior has shades of Tadao Ando’s Church of Light and Robert Venturi’s Fire Station Number Four,

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Rough on Rudolph

The New York Times article about the Paul Rudolph county government center in Goshen, N.Y. that is threatened with demolition, has fueled a keen (and since this is 2012, a rather rude) debate. Many conservationists’ attitude to old buildings is that they should be treated like art, that is, carefully preserved. The problem is that buildings, unlike paintings, are fixed in place. Art that falls out of favor doesn’t have to be destroyed, it can simply be taken out of the front room and put in the back, or in a museum’s open storage,

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The Art Police

 

The controversy over the future Eisenhower Memorial has involved many actors: congressmen and congressional subcommittees, the Eisenhower family, the National Civic Arts Society, the National Capital Planning Commission, and assorted political pundits. A small but influential body central to the process has received less public attention. The U. S. Commission of Fine Arts was the brainchild of Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham, who with Charles F. McKim, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. was the author of the so-called McMillan Plan, which restored the monumental core of Washington, D.C. to L’Enfant’s vision.  Burnham saw the need for an official body to oversee the implementation of the artistic aspects of the plan,

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Great Clients

Following a recent lecture at the School of Visual Arts in New York, a D/Crit student asked me an interesting question. I had been speaking about the important role that a client can play in the architectural process, specifically how Robert Sainsbury had influenced a young Norman Foster—not least by commissioning him—in the design of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich. But what about public clients, the student asked, could the public also be a great client? It is a good question. The history of architecture contains many examples of influential individual clients—Fr. Marie-Alain Couturier at both Ronchamp and La Tourette,

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Real and Unreal

My colleague Enrique Norten sent me a copy of TEN Arquitectos: The Limits of Form, which is hefty catalog of a retrospective exhibition of his firm’s work on display (March 3 – June 4) at the Museo Amparo inPuebla, Mexico. Actually, judging from the illustrations in the book, there are no limits to the forms that have been explored by TEN Arquitectos; the catalog is a dizzying array of commercial and institutional projects, rectangular, angled, round, square, torqued, canted, and slightly askew. As architects tend to do, Norten has included unbuilt as well as built work.

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The Death of Criticism

In 1997, my friend Martin Pawley wrote a column for The Architect’s Journal titled “The Strange Death of Architectural Criticism.” The leading architectural critic of his generation, Martin died in 2008, but I wonder what he would have to say about the latest demise of his craft? The New York Times has a “chief architecture critic” who hardly ever writes about architecture. Paul Goldberger, our leading critic, has not appeared in the New Yorker since September 2011. I always check to see what Sarah Williams Goldhagen, the interesting critic of The New Republic,

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Tiny Palladian House

Last summer I visited Charleston and saw an interesting house designed by George Holt and Andrew Gould. It’s basically a tiny version of Palladio’s Villas Saraceno, or at least its central portion, with the characteristic triple arch. No room for a loggia here, just a single room, barely 12 feet deep, but with a wonderfully tall ceiling that maintains the original villa’s regal scale. A small house with a big attitude. The ingenious plan has a two bedrooms above (each with a bathroom), with two separate staircases which allows one of the rooms to be rented out.

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