JACK DIAMOND
The architect Jack Diamond (1932-2022) died last week. He was perhaps Canada’s leading architect. Yet no-one would refer to him as a starchitect. “It’s easy to do an iconic building,” he once said, “because it’s only solving one issue.” Diamond’s designs were never one-dimensional. His opera house in Toronto is a traditional horseshoe-shaped auditorium situated within an unprepossessing blue-black brick box whose chief feature is a glazed lobby facing one of the city’s main streets; dramatic, but hardly iconic—very Canadian. At $150 million in 2008, the cost of the Four Seasons Centre was modest as opera houses go, but more important was how the money was spent—on the hall and the interiors rather than on exterior architectural effects. Sadly Diamond would not be attending the gala reopening of his last project, the redone David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center. The New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman, writing about the architecture of the hall, was rather mealy-mouthed in his back-handed compliment, “it is like the second-best-looking man in an old Hollywood film: generic, attractive enough, ceding center stage to the star, which is the music.” But ceding center stage to the music is the whole point, isn’t it?
SHEDS
Architecture mags these days cover a variety of topics—sustainable building materials, energy conservation, social equity; it seems that they have decided that building rather than architecture is their domain. But building and architecture are not the same. Nikolaus Pevsner’s introduction to his 1945 classic Outline of European Architecture began with this statement: “A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.” In my beat-up paperback copy, purchased when I was a student, I underlined the sentence and pencilled a question mark in the margin. In those halcyon days I had a youthful reaction to Pevsner’s provocation; now I’m not so sure he was wrong. Pevsner said that what distinguished architecture was its goal of aesthetic appeal. After spending four years writing The Story of Architecture I would expand that claim. The ambition of architecture is not only beauty but also the desire to celebrate, honor, pay homage, and often to impress. That, and not size or cost or function, is what sets architecture apart from building. When Victor Louis was designing the Palais-Royale speculative mixed-use project in Paris in 1781, he gave it similar architectural qualities as his earlier Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux.
THIS IS THE PLACE
Architects and town planners often refer to a “sense of place” as a mark of authenticity. For example, Central Park has a sense of place, but a Walmart parking lot doesn’t. Nothing is as bad as placelessness—the term “placeless sprawl” appears in the first sentence of the Charter of the New Urbanism. It sounds like a logical extension to go from valuing a “sense of place” to “place-making.” But I’m not so sure. When Brigham Young arrived at Salt Lake Valley he is said to have exclaimed, “This is the place!” Young had the benefit of a previous celestial vision. I remember the first time I went to Chez Panisse, or saw the Empire State Building, or walked into the Guggenheim Museum; it was not only a question of design but of memory. We have all been to airport bars that work hard at creating a sense of place with period photos, team pennants, and other knickknacks. The harder they work at it, the more placeless they seem. On the other hand, the Cherry Street Tavern around the corner from where I live is for me a real place, not just because it has a nice wooden bar and old Bob Dylan posters,
READ ALL ABOUT IT
I came across this confident statement in the September issue of New York Review of Architecture, in a rather breathless review of a recent book about Aline and Eero Saarinen: “It is through media, of course, that we primarily consume architecture.” I was brought up short. How preposterous, I said to myself. But on second thought I realized that it was all too true. If there is an audience for architecture—and judging from the almost total absence of architecture columns in the mainstream press one has to be doubtful—it’s likely that its chief connection with architecture is through media rather than first-hand experience. And, consumers, as opposed to building occupants, need to be amused, tittilated, and entertained. The experience of a great building is complex and involves tactile qualities as well as historical memory, attributes that are difficult to convey on a iPhone. I suppose if Steen Eiler Rasmussen were writing his classic handbook today he would have to call it Consuming Architecture. How sad.
PHILADELPHIA SECESSION
The other day, my friend Jonathan Barnett and I were walking down 23rd Street when our attention was drawn to an unusual building on Manning Street, one of those narrow alleys that are common in Philadelphia. Obviously very new, the building caught our eye for a number of reasons. First, the walls were brick, at a time when virtually all infill housing in the city is glass with perhaps a scattering of metal siding. And this brick was not the usual red, but lightly glazed yellow. Second, the regular composition of rectangular openings punched in the facade of this three-story box was similarly unusual at a time when architects are bending over backward to avoid regularity, let alone symmetry. The box-with-openings reminded me of the Haus Wittgenstein in Vienna, designed by Paul Engelman and Ludwig Wittgenstein for the latter’s sister in 1925-28. But the Manning Street building also recalls an earlier period: the Vienna Secession. The windows, which are set into large opening are framed by black L-shaped panels ornamented with geometrical patterns. Ornament! That really set this interesting little building apart. The architects are a local firm, Stanev Potts; Petra Stanev and Stephan Potts.
NIGHT
Love has gone and left me and the days are
all alike;
Eat I must, and sleep I will,–and would that
night were here!
–Edna St.Vincent Millay
