Architecture

HOUSE MEMORY

I met Marcel Breuer in October 1973 at his home in New Canaan, Connecticut. He designed the house, known as Breuer House II, in 1951, a low-slung affair with rough fieldstone walls, a slate floor, and an unpainted wood ceiling. Plate-glass windows looked out on a Calder stabile on the lawn, and nearby woods. We ate lunch sitting on Cesca chairs at a table that consisted of a thick granite slab. Breuer himself, 71, was courtly and engaging. Philip Johnson once called him a “peasant mannerist,” and there was something appealingly simple in his demeanor, as in the house itself.

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NOT THE POST OFFICE

One of the stated goals of the American Institute of Architects Strategic Plan 2021-2025 is “To ensure equity in the profession.” Equity may apply to pay, work opportunities, awards, or even, I suppose, to the makeup of the profession, that is, it should reflect the population as a whole. But the architectural profession is not the post office. It depends on the availability and preferences of clients, it depends on the swings of the economy, and success relies on individual drive and talent. Architecture is a zero-sum game, of course: there are a limited number of building commissions at any one time and if one architect gets the job,

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LET’S PRETEND

I’ve been watching a building going up a block from where I live in Philadelphia. 222 Market Street is a nineteen-story office block. The structure is steel, and except for a couple of odd slanted columns at one end, it is the sort of regular frame of I-beams that engineers have been designing for well over a hundred years; the first steel framed building in the U.S., was Burnham & Root’s ten-story Rand McNally Building in Chicago, erected in 1890. When the Market Street steel was topped off the structure reminded me of the high-rises that Mies van der Rohe put up in Chicago in the 1950s.

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FAME


I’ve just finished reading Roxanne Williamson’s American Architects and the Mechanics of Fame (1991). Despite some interesting historical research into the professional connections between architects and their mentors/employers, it is not a very satisfying book. The first question to ask about fame is “Who is judging?” The public, the architectural profession, the critics, architectural historians? Williamson considered only the last group. She compiled an “Index of Fame” by consulting twenty histories of architecture and four encyclopedias, and counting the number of times individual architects were listed. Since most recent historians (Giedion, Hitchcock,

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M. ROGERS

The architect Richard Rogers, 88, died yesterday. His obituaries invariably started by mentioning the Centre Pompidou, the seriously ill-conceived museum that turned the youthful Rogers and his partner Renzo Piano, into overnight sensations. I remember that when I was a member of the Commission of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C., a now seasoned Rogers came before us to present 300 New Jersey Avenue, an addition to an old office building near Union Station. The limestone building was designed in 1935 by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon (the architects of the Empire State Building), a fine example of early American modernism: a blend of practical engineering,

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RULES OF THUMB

At a time when most schools of architecture have courses in what is referred to as “history-theory,” I was struck by a sentence in Laurie Olin’s forthcoming collection, Essays on Landscape. “Contrary to many architects I knew, I believed that theory is developed in retrospect, to account for what had been or was being done in the field, and that it rarely preceded or led creative practice.” Just so. Some buildings are, in a sense, experiments, and when something works, and is taken up by others, it eventually becomes a rule of thumb, perhaps even a theory.

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MEMORIES

Last week I visited Planting Fields, a Jazz Age estate on Long Island’s Gold Coast. The house was completed in 1921, designed by Alexander Stewart Walker (1876–1952) and Leon Narcisse Gillette (1878–1945), whose Manhattan firm was responsible for several Long Island country houses. The style of the house is usually described as Tudor Revival. Walking around the sprawling mansion I was reminded why historical revival styles were so popular for so long. To begin with, the house is not really a recreation of a particular historical period. There are half-timbered parts, limestone parts, and an entry that reminded me of Christopher Wren.

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JUST A SERVICE ENTRANCE

I think it was Christopher Alexander who I once heard observe that everything in our surroundings—everything—either raises our spirits or dampens them. It may only be a notch or two, but every thing we look at makes us feel either slightly better or slightly worse. My afternoon walk often takes me past the rear of the Board of Education Building in Philadelphia, and a detail in that building always gives me a lift. It’s the service entrance. I know that’s what it is because the name is elegantly carved into the stone door frame. The building was designed in 1930 in a style sometimes called Moderne,

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