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, or a sense of public sobriety in a whimsical legal office building. Was ChatGPT just “halucinating,” or was it sending a message?

I’ve been writing about Planting Fields, a Roaring Twenties estate on Long Island’s North Shore, Great Gatsby territory. The house, an impressive Tudor pile, was designed by Walker & Gillette in 1918-22; the garden was laid out by Olmsted Brothers. Like the more than five hundred country retreats that were built on the so-called Gold Coast during that era, it was inspired by the British country house, think Brideshead or Downton Abbey. But while the American versions of manors, chateaux, and villas, are beautiful architecturally, they are hollow representations of an unattainable ideal. These country family seats lasted less than one generation before their sprawling grounds were subdivided and sold off, the houses themselves either demolished or converted into institutional or commercial uses. In that regard Planting Fields is unusual. Its 400 acres survive as a state historic park and arboretum. It’s now been a public place longer than it ever was a private home. The house is there, too, a touching relic of a makebelieve moment.

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), and James Renwick’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral (1859). Cram certainly considered Collegiate Gothic to be a part of America’s cultural heritage. Describing Penn’s Quadrangle buildings he wrote: “First of all, let it be said at once that primarily they are what they should be: scholastic in inspiration and effect, and scholastic of the type that is ours by inheritance, of Oxford and Cambridge, not of Padua or Wittenberg or Paris.” I suspect that in Cram’s mind, the inheritance of Anglo-Saxon culture trumped that of imperial Rome.

“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. So what does? A fortuitous confederacy of talents helps: Brunelleschi, Alberti, and Bramante in the Renaissance; McKim, Burnham, Saint-Gaudens and others in the American Renaissance; Corbusier, Mies, and Aalto in the early Modern Movement. This doesn’t always work: the emergence of gifted architects such as Rudolph, Kahn, and Van Eyck, in the 1960s proved insufficient. A necessary—though not sufficient—condition for creating architecture is wealth and stability, so disruptions to these can sometimes unstick worn-out thinking: the collapse of the Roman Empire, the rise of European city states, the First World War. Whatever the cause, unsticking architecture, when it occurs, is usually unforeseen, unplanned, and contingent. We shall have to wait and see, I told my friend. I’m not sure that he found that very helpful.