Architecture

PHILADELPHIA SECESSION

The other day, my friend Jonathan Barnett and I were walking down 23rd Street when our attention was drawn to an unusual building on Manning Street, one of those narrow alleys that are common in Philadelphia. Obviously very new, the building caught our eye for a number of reasons. First, the walls were brick, at a time when virtually all infill housing in the city is glass with perhaps a scattering of metal siding. And this brick was not the usual red, but lightly glazed yellow. Second, the regular composition of rectangular openings punched in the facade of this three-story box was similarly unusual at a time when architects are bending over backward to avoid regularity,

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NIGHT

Love has gone and left me and the days are
all alike;
Eat I must, and sleep I will,–and would that
night were here!

–Edna St.Vincent Millay

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REVIVALS VS. TRANSPLANTS

Revivalism in architecture refers to a style that consciously echoes or evokes the style of a previous era. This blurs an important distinction. The Italian Renaissance and the British Gothic Revival were echoing the styles of earlier eras, earlier local eras. The Greek Revival, on the other hand, whether it occurred in Berlin, Edinburgh, or Philadelphia, was a foreign style from far away; it was a transplant. That did not mean that it was less authentic, but it did give it a different meaning. When Robert A. M. Stern built Franklin and Murray colleges at Yale in 2017, he was reviving James Gamble Rogers’s Collegiate Gothic of the previous century. But Rogers had not revived a local tradition; his inspiration was a collection of postcards and photographs of Oxbridge colleges (that he had not visited). He was transplanting.

DECADENCE

I was listening to some old interviews on Tyler Cowen’s podcast, Conversations with Tyler, and came across this one, with Ross Douthat, made in March, 2020. Douthat made this observation about architecture: “I would say that, basically, the place that modern architecture has ended up and the traditionalist alternative are both sort of decadent . . .” I found that interesting, since modernism and traditionalism are usually described as a divide rather than as evidence of the same thing. Decadence in modernism is apparent in the (fruitless) search for unceasing novelty, that takes architects into increasingly obscure ratholes.

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MOYNIHAN HALL, CONT’D.

A little more about the question of style. Style is not about what you say but how you say it, not about content but delivery. The impersonal announcements of voicemail, or of a public address system, are almost pure content, there is very little delivery beyond a certain functional brevity. But an actual person speaking includes variable emphasis of tone and volume, facial expressions, hand gestures, asides, jokes, and so on. The effect can be conversational or stentorian, formal or informal, intimate or cold, depending on the style. That is why the word was originally used in the context of rhetoric.

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MOYNIHAN HALL

When I was a practicing architect and a structural problem arose I would ask my engineer friend, Emmanuel Leon, for advice. Once I was designing a house which required a long span. In his pragmatic Filipino way he asked me, “Do you want it cheap or architectural?” (I wanted the latter and he designed an upside-down king post truss.) I thought of Emmanuel when I walked into Penn Station in New York recently. It was my first trip on Amtrak in several years, and I was looking forward to seeing the much lauded station hall, which is in the old Farley post office building.

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A HOLIDAY FROM HISTORY

I was listening to a conversation between Peter Robinson and Bari Weiss on the Hoover Institution’s Uncommon Knowledge podcast. I was brought up short by Weiss’s phrase: “a holiday from history.” Weiss and Robinson were talking about what she called The Great Unraveling, but it struck me that a “holiday from history” could easily refer to architecture, which since roughly the 1920s has turned away from the past. Where once architects had learned their art in part by studying history, whether in books or through travel, they now had their vision resolutely focused in only one direction—the future.

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CRYSTAL CITY

Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a German writer of the turn of the nineteenth century; today we would call him a sci-fi author. In 1914 he wrote a novel with the unwieldily title The Grey Cloth and Ten Percent of White. The protagonist is an architect, more specifically a “glass architect,” and Scheerbart dedicated the book to Bruno Taut, a Berlin architect who promoted the idea of revolutionary all-glass buildings. Glasarchitektur (the title of another Scheerbart book) was an avant-garde obsession; Taut imagined “glowing crystal houses and floating, ever-changing glass ornaments.” When I look out my window I can see his crystal city come to life.

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