Architecture

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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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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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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Several weeks ago I was interviewed by Carolyn Stewart for American Purpose. One of her questions was: “Are there any overlooked aspects of classical architecture – whether an element of design, function, or ethos – that deserve to be rediscovered in the current moment?” That reminded me of President Trump’s recent executive order promoting the classical style for federal buildings, subsequently withdrawn by the Biden administration. The idea that we should learn from the past raised the ire of many at the time, but yesterday’s buildings do offer real lessons. One concerns the presence of art, a long tradition in architecture.

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Architectural history is sometimes recounted as if it evolved autonomously, architects attacking and solving architectural problems largely of their own devising. But because buildings are large, complicated, and expensive, architecture is subject—more than other arts—to outside forces, economic, political, social. Here’s a historical counterfactual. What if the Depression and the Second World War hadn’t happened? What if construction hadn’t been halted for more than a decade and the American modernist movement of the Twenties and Thirties that produced the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, the Folger Shakespeare Library and  the Walter Reed Naval Medical Center, Omaha’s Union Station and Los Angeles City Hall,

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The Architect’s Newspaper reports that two “historic Brutalist” buildings in Trenton, N.J. are in the process of being demolished. The early 1960s buildings, which housed offices and labs of the state government, are the work of Alfred and Jane West Clauss, both partners in Clauss & Nolan. The German-born Alfred Clauss (1906-98) worked briefly for Mies on the Barcelona Pavilion and after emigrating to the U.S. he worked for George Howe on the PSFS Building and was one of the Philadelphians whom Howe brought to teach at Yale (Louis Kahn was another). Jane Clauss (1907-2003), born in Minneapolis,

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Art Nouveau lasted only a few decades; it appeared around 1890 and came to an end shortly after the First World War. Perhaps for that reason, it is often given short shrift by art historians who see it as a not altogether respectable prelude to modernism. “With novelty [Art Nouveau] must most certainly be connected, and liberty at least in the sense of license is applicable too,” sniffed Nikolaus Pevsner, who called it “suspiciously sophisticated  and refined.” He did not explain why sophistication and refinement were disqualifying qualities. “Art Nouveau is outré and directs its appeal to the aesthete,

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