I was recently listening to an online interview with Bret Stephens. Speaking admiringly of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke, the New York Times columnist referred to Burke’s approach as “the wisdom of experience rather than the wisdom of theory.” While this pithy observation describes liberal politics, it struck me that it could equally be applied to architecture. At its best, this is an art of the possible, that is, what has worked rather than what should work. That is why architects in the past generally studied a widely accepted canon—the accumulated wisdom of experience. It was only in the late twentieth century that “History Theory” emerged as an architectural discipline, a—misguided in my opinion—attempt to promote a wisdom of the other kind.

A while back I wrote a blog on the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art’s indiscriminate use of “classical” and “traditional.” More recently I’ve been writing an essay about the origins of the American campus and the Collegiate Gothic style. I was reading the chapter on “Educational Groups” in The American Vitruvius, Werner Hegemann and Elbert Peets’s “Handbook of Civic Art,” published in 1922. It’s clear that at that time classicists did not consider Gothic to be an acceptable style. “Some recent designs for the grounds of colleges and similar institutions have abandoned both American tradition and the classic forms from which American tradition is derived and have elected Gothic and Elizabethan forms instead, which have no roots in the traditional art of this continent,” wrote the authors. Pointedly, they did not include prominent Collegiate Gothic buildings such as Cope & Stewardson’s Quadrangle at Penn (above), or Ralph Adams Cram’s Graduate College at Princeton.

Is classicism the only American tradition? I think one could make a good case that the Gothic is as much rooted in early American history. Examples include Trinity Church in New Haven (1812), Richard Upjohn’s Trinity Church in New York (1840),

“What is to be done?” my friend asked. We had been discussing the rather low current state of architecture, countless glass boxes, undisciplined and arbitrary designs, a profession at sea. We have been here before. Because fashion is an unavoidable aspect of architecture—not the main thing, but always lurking in the background—architecture does not evolve steadily like science or technology, it swings back and forth and occasionally gets grounded. That happened in the United States in the late nineteenth century, and it took a Richardson and a McKim to shake it out of its lethargy. Something similar happened in the 1970s, after the International Style had worn itself out. James Stirling put it well when he said at the time “The language itself was so reductive that only exceptional people could design modern buildings in a way that was interesting. It got stuck and it will have to unstick itself to move one.” Stirling, along with Graves and Venturi, looked to the past to help with that unsticking, but the result—Postmodernism—proved thin gruel. Can digital computing provide a more substantive answer? Proponents trumpet the virtues of “parametric architecture,” but design technology (the pencil?) and constructional breakthroughs (reinforced concrete?) have  rarely moved the architectural needle.