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,
PARK BENCHES
When I wrote Now I Sit Me Down, a history of chairs and sitting, I included folding chairs, office chairs, and chairs on wheels, but I neglected park benches. I suppose I took them for granted. Whenever I go for a walk I often sit down on a park bench. They’re usually not very comfortable. Some are made out of heavy slabs of wood, to reduce maintenance, I suppose; more modern benches seem to be designed mainly to discourage loafing. As with much sitting furniture, you have to go back in time to find an exemplary design, in the case of benches, to mid-nineteenth century Paris. Jean-Antoine-Gabriel Davioud (1824-1881) was a prize-winning graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts who worked for the Paris planning department at the time that Baron Haussmann was remaking the city. Davioud designed fountains, arches, and gates, as well as those characteristic advertising columns plastered with posters that you can still see on Parisian boulevards. He was also responsible for two types of benches: the banc droit, or upright bench, a simple two-way facing bench with a shared back, and his wonderfully designed banc gondole. The gondola bench is made of thin wooden strips supported by cast iron frames.
SKETCHING
Architects have always travelled with sketchbook in hand. Partly it’s a way of recording interesting places, but more importantly, it’s a way of seeing. The opposite of point-and-shoot, sitting and drawing is a leisurely way to absorb one’s surroundings. My friend Laurie Olin, a lifelong travel sketcher, has been publishing collections of his sketches, grouped by country; four years ago France Sketchbooks and recently In Italy, both from ORO Editions. Olin’s sketches are more than attractive impressions—although they are that—they also reflect a landscape architect’s practiced eye, being full of detailed notes and observations. What also struck me is how his sketches are often populated, like the church of Santa Maria della Consolazione in Todi (above). This sets him apart from most architects who tend to record buildings and spaces but not the life they contain. In Olin’s sketch, the sixteenth-century church, which had many architects, including Bramante, Sangallo, and Vignola, becomes a classical backdrop for groups of sitters, and for a mother and child and their little dog.
THE END OF ARCHITECTURE?
I got an email request the other day. The sender had asked ChatGPT “What are the best articles about architecture written since 1990?” and the third recommendation, after two essays by Koolhaas, was “The End of Architecture?” by Witold Rybczynski. According to the bot, “In this provocative article published in 1996, Rybczynski reflects on the state of architecture at the end of the 20th century and questions whether the discipline has reached its limits or if new directions are emerging.” Stirring stuff. Could I send a link to the article, my correspondent asked? He had been unable to find it online, he explained.
No wonder he had trouble finding it—this article doesn’t exist. I never wrote “The End of Architecture?” but perhaps I should have. When I look at the new buildings going up in my neighborhood, the results don’t really qualify as Architecture. In a chapter titled “The Fundamental Principles of Architecture,” Vitruvius wrote: “Architecture depends on Order, Arrangement, Eurythmy [beauty], Symmetry, Propriety, and Economy.” I search in vain for these qualities. By economy, Vitruvius did not mean cheapness—there’s plenty of that—but rather suitability, that is, how a building is appropriate to its station in life. I look in vain for a sense of private decorum in a row of chic houses,
ORDER WITHOUT DESIGN
Last summer I ran into Alain Bertaud in Charleston (above). We had first met in India, when he was at the World Bank and I was at McGill Uiversity, working on a research project with B.V. Doshi’s Vastu Shilpa Foundation. I had not seen Alain in the intervening forty years yet our conversation effortlessly picked up where it left off. We were both architects who had been drawn to urbanism, which is not that unusual, but we also shared the rarer experience of being exposed to urban economists, and learning to see city planning through their eyes. Alain describes his experience in Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities (MIT Press, 2018). This book is based on the simple thesis that “cities are primarily labor markets,” and in that sense it is as mighty a critique of city planning as Jane Jacobs’s Life and Death of Great American Cities was fifty-five years ago. Like Jacobs, Bertaud observes rather than theorizes, except that he casts his eye far and wide, on cities in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Bertaud brings more than five decades of experience to the task. Ed Glaeser has called him “one of the world’s great urbanists.” No exaggeration.
RADOSLAV ZUK (1931-2024)
Rad Zuk was a longtime colleague of mine when I taught at McGill for two decades, but my first encounter with him was when I was a student there in the 1960s. I was in the penultimate year of a six-year course. Zuk had joined the faculty a year or two earlier, and I had not had him as a teacher, but somehow I ended up briefly working for him. I can’t remember if he approached me, or if I saw a want ad on the school bulletin board. The job was to draw up a project he was working on—a church. I didn’t know then that he specialized in Ukrainian Greek Catholic churches, having already built several in Manitoba, where he had been living. He was an ethnic Ukrainian, born in Lubaczów, Poland, grew up in Austria, and emigrated to Canada, studying architecture at McGill and MIT. I wasn’t sure what to make of his project. Like Orthodox churches, Ukrainian Greek Catholic churches have specific architectural traditions, onion domes, icons, painted interiors. Zuk’s design had these features, but it also had a modern plan that was rigorously Miesian. This was a blending of new and old, but with none of the tongue-in-cheek mimicry which would characterize the postmodernism movement that would appear in a few years.
