A WRITING LIFE: PART ONE
In the 1970s I belonged to the Minimum Cost Housing Group at McGill University in Montreal. Our research included third world slums, alternative technology, composting toilets, well, that was the seventies. We published and sold booklets—Stop the Five Gallon Flush was the most successful. Around 1978 I thought it would be a good idea to combine all the publications in a book—after all, this was the era of the Whole Earth Catalog and the Domebook. I didn’t have much success finding a trade publisher. I did get one positive response from Bill Strachan, a Doubleday editor. He was not keen about my proposal, but he had read a short article of mine in Stewart Brand’s little magazine, CoEvolution Quarterly. Would I consider expanding my article into a book, he asked? Why not, I thought. Paper Heroes: A Review of Appropriate Technology was my first book. (The jacket above is from the 1991 Penguin edition.)
OPEN BUILDING
My friend Steve Kendall gave me a copy of his latest book, written with the late John Habraken, Open Building for Architects. Wiki defines Open Building as “an approach to the design of buildings that takes account of the possible need to change or adapt the building during its lifetime.” Reflecting on this ambitious goal—buildings can last for centuries—led me to a conclusion: There’s no such thing as Open Building. Or, to put it another way, buildings have always been open to change.
I am put in mind of the Uffizi Museum (originally magistrates’ offices), the Louvre, the Hermitage, the Belvedere (originally royal and imperial palaces), the Tate Modern (originally a power station), the Musée d’Orsay (originally a railway terminal), the National Portrait Gallery (originally the Patent Office), and the Prado (originally designed as a science museum). Of course, these are all famous museums, but Europe is full of palazzos, mansions, and hôtels, that have found second and third lives in a variety of altered uses.
Closer to home, consider building change in my city, Philadelphia. Innumerable row houses have been converted to non-residential uses, innumerable industrial lofts repurposed to residential use,
GOD-KNOWS-WHAT-KIND-OF-CLASSIC
I read Catesby Leigh’s interesting article, “Uncle Sam’s Buildings,” in The American Conservative. He argues in favor of the federal buildings that were built in the prewar era, and which more or less followed the classical style, and is critical of the modernist era, perhaps best characterized by the awful FBI headquarters building in DC. His essay brought up a question for me. The examples of classical federal buildings that he admires are all from a particular era, and his essay implies that this architectural style should continue ad infinitum. Whatever the merits of this suggestion, it does fly in the face of all we know about history. Architecture has never stood still: Bramante was followed by Bernini, then Wren, then Edwin Lutyens, then Paul Cret. There are many examples of federal buildings of the 1930s (which Leigh conveniently ignores), that represent a different sort of traditional approach: in my city, Philadelphia, Rankin & Kellog’s main post office across from 30th Street Station (illustrated above), and Harry Sternfield’s Nix federal courthouse and post office; in DC, Cret’s Federal Reserve Board Building, and Bertram Goodhue’s National Academy of Sciences on the National Mall. None of these architects used the usual paraphernalia of Beaux-Arts classicism,
PHILADELPHIA ON THE ROCKS
A happy four days spent on Mount Desert Island. Gave a lecture on Planting Fields to the Beatrix Farrand Society; visited the spectacular Abby Rockefeller Garden; had a memorable lunch at Martha Stewart’s great house, Skylands; saw a beautiful wooden body 1913 Peugeot in the Seal Cove Auto Museum; went sailing on a Herreshoff canoe yawl; ate Scott Koniecko’s perfect oysters in his as-yet unfinished perfect house. I stayed in Northeast Harbor, once known as Philadelphia on the Rocks because so many Philadelphians summered there, and because they were a tipsy crowd. Cheers!
WRITING
In a spirited talk at Purdue University, the noted biographer Stacy Schiff was asked what advice she might give to aspiring writers. “Your only job is to make the reader turn the page,” was one of her answers. Pithy, and true. Years and years ago, before she became a famous biographer, Stacy was an assistant editor at Viking, my editor when I was writing Home. Later, when I was setting out to write a biography of Frederick Law Olmsted I too asked her for advice. “You need to learn everything about your subject,” she counseled, “but the reader doesn’t need to know everything you know.” Equally good advice, and not just for biographers.
ARCHITECTURE AND BUILDING
“It is very necessary, in the outset of all inquiry, to distinguish carefully between Architecture and Building,” wrote John Ruskin in the opening chapter of The Seven Lamps of Architecture. The modern democratic spirit tends to resist this distinction. Surely all buildings can be architecture, the humble as well as the grand, the cottage as well as the cathedral? The problem with this well-meaning leveling out is not that it elevates the former but that it tends to lower the latter. When a utilitarian apartment block or office building is treated as architecture, that establishes a sort of benchmark in which repetition, functionality, and practicality become preeminent architectural virtues. What then is to distinguish the civic or religious monument? “Nothing” said Mies van der Rohe, whose severe logic required him to use a similar architectural language for both the chapel (above) and the heating plant at IIT. Less doctrinaire early twentieth century architects, who found themselves obliged to design both office buildings and cathedrals, remained cognizant of the difference. Their commonsense solution was to introduce Architecture piecemeal. A factory building might get a classical entrance portal; a department store display window might warrant a special surround. In an office tower,
