Architecture

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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A PAST WORTH SAVING

The historic preservation movement, as I think Vincent Scully once pointed out, was the most powerful expression of public interest in architecture of the twentieth century. But the truth is that the historic preservation movement was not really about preserving the past; people did not want to save Penn Station because it was old, or because it was an expression of a particular era. They wanted to save it because it was beautiful, beautifully conceived and beautifully built. The four decades between 1900 and 1940 were a magical period in American architecture. Comparable, as Augustus Saint-Gaudens observed, to the Italian Renaissance—a perfect joining of money,

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INSTRUCTION AND INSPIRATION

A reader recently wrote to me citing Frank Lloyd Wright as a model for the future. “Wright’s discipline itself offers us an antidote to the wandering efforts of rudderless students: it can be understood and undertaken by those with a little personal aptitude and a readiness for hard work to design buildings of real point, character, freshness, and charm.” How likely is a Wright Revival? Historical examples of revivals abound: Inigo Jones revived Palladio, Wren revived Bramante, Lutyens revived Wren. More recently, Richard Meier launched his career by reviving early Corbusier, Tadao Ando learned a lot from Kahn, and Thomas Phifer has revisited Mies.

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DRESS AND DECOR

I recently wrote an essay for the catalog of the Polish pavilion at the London Design Biennale 2021. The theme of the exhibit of handwoven textiles was “The Clothed Home,” and the title of my essay was “Dress and Decor.” I think I first made this connection when I was writing Home, and looking at paintings of interiors. François Boucher’s enchanting “La Toilette,” painted in 1742 and currently hanging in the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza of Madrid, was one of these. I was struck with how the dress of the two women, and the materials of the decor—the Chinese folding screen,

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