On Culture and Architecture
My friends Nancy and Randy Williams sent me this photo taken recently at the Villa Witold in Charleston, SC. The villa, inspired by the loggia of Palladio’s Villa Saraceno, was built in 2011 by Reid Burgess, George Holt, and Andrew Gould. Palladio built the original in 1548 outside Finale de Agugliaro, a small town in the Veneto. Described in detail in Charleston Fancy: Little Houses & Big Dreams in the Holy City.
Sorry to hear of Doug Kelbaugh’s passing. I met him at Seaside when he was involved in the New Urbanism movement, but I first heard of him in 1973, in connection with a solar house that he built for himself in Princeton. It made an impression because unlike most solar-heated houses of that period, which had sloping solar collectors and resembled wedges of cheese, the Kelbaugh House had real architectural qualities. The house was passively solar heated by means of a Trombe wall, named for its inventor, Félix Trombe (1906-85), a French engineer who was in charge of building a 1000 kW solar furnace in southern France.
In April 2005 I wrote my Slate column about the projected move of the Barnes Foundation to downtown Philadelphia: “Why not treat the galleries of the Barnes as an artistically significant artifact, and simply move them to the new location, burlap-covered walls and all? The result would resemble the transplanted historical interiors exhibited in many large museums, such as the Ottoman room at the Metropolitan Museum.” Well, that’s what they did—sort of. I had avoided visiting the new Barnes since I was attached to the original, but last week I finally relented. The collection hung as before (following a judge’s ruling),
Duo Dickinson seems to have discovered the stacked box fad in a recent post on Common\Edge. Well, duh. In April 2009 I wrote a Slate column about “The Jenga Effect.” It was prompted by 56 Leonard Street, a New York apartment building designed by Herzog & De Meuron. Of course, what looked like a pile of stacked boxes was actually a conventional high-rise with cantilevers and setbacks. I think what attracted architects to stacking was the appearance of shakiness; architects in the past had always aimed at solidity, so why not go the other way?
The Sainsbury Wing of London’s National Gallery is an example of postmodernism, a style that was already in decline when Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown won a controversial competition to build this addition. In the eyes of many, including this writer, the Sainsbury Wing, like James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, is one of the (rare?) paragons of postmodernism. So it was with dismay that I read the headline in Dezeen: “Sainsbury Wing Revamp Approved.” Revamp? Although the Sainsbury Wing is a Grade I-listed building, it apparently needs freshening up. The freshening up includes removing some of the non-structural columns in the lobby as well as carving a large Trump-like sign into the Portland stone facade.
Architecture mags these days cover a variety of topics—sustainable building materials, energy conservation, social equity; it seems that they have decided that building rather than architecture is their domain. But building and architecture are not the same. Nikolaus Pevsner’s introduction to his 1945 classic Outline of European Architecture began with this statement: “A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.” In my beat-up paperback copy, purchased when I was a student, I underlined the sentence and pencilled a question mark in the margin. In those halcyon days I had a youthful reaction to Pevsner’s provocation;
Architects and town planners often refer to a “sense of place” as a mark of authenticity. For example, Central Park has a sense of place, but a Walmart parking lot doesn’t. Nothing is as bad as placelessness—the term “placeless sprawl” appears in the first sentence of the Charter of the New Urbanism. It sounds like a logical extension to go from valuing a “sense of place” to “place-making.” But I’m not so sure. When Brigham Young arrived at Salt Lake Valley he is said to have exclaimed, “This is the place!” Young had the benefit of a previous celestial vision.
I came across this confident statement in the September issue of New York Review of Architecture, in a rather breathless review of a recent book about Aline and Eero Saarinen: “It is through media, of course, that we primarily consume architecture.” I was brought up short. How preposterous, I said to myself. But on second thought I realized that it was all too true. If there is an audience for architecture—and judging from the almost total absence of architecture columns in the mainstream press one has to be doubtful—it’s likely that its chief connection with architecture is through media rather than first-hand experience.