PARISIAN PUZZLE

PARISIAN PUZZLE

Every time I leave the Larkin Building in downtown Philadelphia, where we live, I admire the office building across the street. It’s a French Renaissance pile, three stories on top of a half basement, with an obviously more recent top floor addition. The original building, very handsome, is brick with limestone and marble trim. The raised entrance is surmounted by a wrought iron papal balcony. I’ve looked inside and there is a glass-roofed atrium in the middle. I’m impressed, but also puzzled. The building looks at least a hundred years old, and when it was built this was an industrial neighborhood with a scattering of modest Philadelphia row-houses. The Larkin Building is an 11-story loft, built as a warehouse in 1912 by the same company that commissioned Wright to build its headquarters in Buffalo. So what was this rather elegant French Renaissance hôtel doing here? Was it built by some eccentric Parisian immigrant, an emigré count perhaps, or a remittance man? According the Hidden City, a website devoted to historic Philadelphia buildings, 2133 Arch Street was built in 1908 by the City to serve as a Juvenile Court and House of Detention. It was a jail! That explains the location—the land was inexpensive. It doesn’t explain the ambitious architecture. The architect was Philip H. Johnson (1868-1933), who worked for the Department of Public Health and was responsible for several city hospitals as well as the old Philadelphia Convention Hall. The City did not skimp—the budget was $200,000, about $5 million today, and Johnson delivered a building well under that figure. He put a lot of effort into the design. This was a time, long since passed, when a municipal building, even a house of detention, was treated as an important civic symbol. The building continued in its original use until 1952, and was sold by the City in the early 1980s, when a developer converted it into office use, added the top floor, and converted the open courtyard into an atrium. The architecture always raises my spirits when I look at it.

CRIPES, NICK

CRIPES, NICK

I just learned that Nick Wilkinson (1942-2017) died. Sad news. We had lost touch in recent years but we saw a lot of each other in the 1980s. Nick founded and edited Open House International, a journal devoted to housing. He published a number of my papers as well as an issue devoted to “Seventeen Years of Minumum Cost Housing” and I was a member of the editorial board. Thanks to the British Council, Nick visited me in Montreal and lectured at McGill, and I visited him in Newcastle and lectured at the university, where he was then teaching. I stayed at his home. It was winter and the house was pretty cold. I still remember the medieval sight of Nick and his children huddling around the stove, toasting bread. 

ROUGHLY CLASSIC

ROUGHLY CLASSIC

Earlier this week I watched a live video webcast of a roundtable concerning the debate over the future of federal architecture, that is, on whether federal buildings such as courthouses should have a mandated classical style. There was immediate confusion because two of the participants–Notre Dame University professors–stated that classicism wasn’t a style at all. Then what was it? There was talk about local materials, green buildings, and load-bearing construction, which wasn’t much help. But if classicism wasn’t a style what exactly would a federal mandate entail? The confusion was compounded further by the interchangeable use of “classical” and “traditional.” Classical refers to the Graeco-Roman tradition; traditional is popularly used to refer to any pre-modern architectural style such as Gothic, Spanish Colonial, or California Mission. But what about a government building such as Bertram Goodhue’s splendid Nebraska State Capitol, which opened in 1932?  Wiki describers it as having “elements of  Achaemenid, Assyrian, Byzantine, Gothic, and Romanesque architecture.” Goodhue himself wrote: “So, while the architectural style employed may, roughly, be called ‘Classic,’ it makes no pretense of belonging to any period of the past.” A free spirit like Goodhue would have caviled at the idea of a mandated style. Mandates are good for seat belts and face masks; not so good for creativity.

PHILLY PANTO

PHILLY PANTO

Do we still celebrate Columbus Day? This summer, statues of the intrepid explorer were defaced, beheaded, and toppled. In South Philadelphia, the City shrouded a Columbus statue and recently announced its removal. It is unclear what will happen to the Columbus Memorial near the Delaware River. The 106-foot ersatz obelisk was designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in 1992. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “The Delaware River Waterfront Corp., which maintains the monument but was not responsible for its construction, said in a statement Tuesday that the statue ‘does not align with DRWC’s mission to create and maintain a safe and welcome space for all.’” In order to “protect public safety” and “reduce continued pain” the now offensive text at the base of the obelisk, which identifies Columbus as “Charismatic Leader, Navigator, Mathematician, Cartographer” has been covered over with plywood. Safe spaces. The Orwellian pantomime continues.

THE TALENTED MR. CRET

THE TALENTED MR. CRET

Perhaps the most televised twentieth-century work of American architecture is the Federal Reserve headquarters (Eccles Building) in Washington, D.C., designed by Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945) in 1938. Cret’s stripped classical facade inevitably accompanies any report on the Fed on the nightly news. Now Cret has a twofer: Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, where President Trump was taken for treatment of Covid-19.  Walter Reed was designed by Cret in 1939-42. It is said that President Roosevelt suggested the twenty-story tower to Cret after visiting Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue’s Nebraska State Capitol. Walter Reed is an example of Cret’s late style, a blend of stripped Classicism and Art Deco. Cret never designed a skyscraper, but this gives a good idea of the direction he might have taken.

INFLUENCE

INFLUENCE

The cancel culture never sleeps. The discovery that Edward Hopper once copied paintings “challenges the notion that Hopper was an absolute original, uninfluenced by others” according to the breathless headline in the New York Times. A rather silly conclusion since Hopper was sixteen at the time, and was obviously using the paintings of others as an exercise, to hone his—yet unformed—skills. And since neither the technique nor the themes of these pedestrian paintings prefigure his later work, it is a real stretch to speak of “influence.” When I was sixteen I remember clumsily copying Picasso’s “Mirror Woman”; the masonite panel hung in my parents’ basement rec room for years. I was rather proud of it.

THE USUAL SUSPECTS

THE USUAL SUSPECTS

The City of Philadelphia has announced a $2.2 billion development on the Penn’s Landing site beside the Delaware River. The twelve towers include apartments, offices, and a hotel, the architects are Pelli Clarke Pelli and Bjarke Ingels Group. PCP has already designed high-rise buildings in the city; BIG is a newcomer. Both continue the recent pattern of importing outsiders such as Vinoly, Foster, Gehry, Snøhetta, Williams & Tsien, Pei Cobb Freed, Ennead—the usual suspects. Philadelphia, like most big cities, once had its own stable of eminent practitioners—Strickland, Walter, Furness, Cope & Stewardson, Eyre, Trumbauer, Cret, Howe—and their buildings gave the city its own particular character. That is gone. Now what we get are generic solutions that could be anywhere. The proposed Penn’s Landing buildings will be all-glass, of course.

CANCEL CULTURE

CANCEL CULTURE

Although some have claimed that the “cancel culture” doesn’t really exist, a nationwide Zogby Analytics poll of likely voters recently found that a narrow plurality (37 percent) supported cancel culture, with 32 percent opposed and 30 percent “not sure.” Some of the poll details are interesting: support was stronger among men than among women, and stronger in the East than in the Midwest; the strongest support was among younger voters, 18-29 and 30-49, whereas the strongest opposition was among voters over 65; and also—surprisingly, at least to me—opposition was strong among the youngest group, 18-24. Self-styled conservative voters were equally split between support and opposition to the cancel culture, whereas 62 percent of progressives voiced support, compared to only 15 percent opposed. It appears that cancel culture (an oxymoron if ever there was one) is fated to be a part of American life for some time to come.

WOKE SPEED BUMP

WOKE SPEED BUMP

Museum directors, college deans, and newspaper editors take note.

A few weeks ago a petition spearheaded by a San Francisco Bay Area high school senior was submitted to the Trader Joe’s supermarket company that included the following claim. “The Trader Joe’s branding is racist because it exoticizes [sic] other cultures — it presents ‘Joe’, as the default ‘normal’ and the other characters falling outside of it … The common thread between all of these transgressions is the perpetuation of exoticism, the goal of which is not to appreciate other cultures, but to further other and distance them from the perceived ‘normal.’” These days such statements are followed by steely-eyed demands, and these days most companies and institutions comply.

Trader Joe’s response? “A few weeks ago, an online petition was launched calling on us to ‘remove racist packaging from [our] products.’ Following were inaccurate reports that the petition prompted us to take action. We want to be clear: we disagree that any of these labels are racist. We do not make decisions based on petitions.”

As a dedicated TJ shopper I say, “Good for them.” 

THE WAY WE LIVE TODAY

THE WAY WE LIVE TODAY

I am a latecomer to the Jordan Peterson phenomenon. I haven’t read any of his books but I have listened to numerous lectures and interviews. A 2018 interview with NYU professor Jonathan Hardt, founder of the Heterodox Academy,  about the causes for the unravelling of the contemporary university touched me close to home. Peterson appeared on the social media battlefield after involving himself in a free speech controversy with the University of Toronto, his employer. Peterson’s views have made him a lightning rod for radical left-wing critics who have trotted out the usual accusations: hate-speech mongerer, fascist, racist, white supremacist. Peterson collects native Canadian art from coastal British Columbia, and has formed a friendship with Charles Joseph, an accomplished Kwakwaka’wakw carver from the Ma’amtaglia-Tlowitsis tribe. In a blanketing ceremony Peterson was given a Kwak’wala name and made an honorary member of Joseph’s family. Unexpected for a racist white supremacist.

Photo: Carving, Charles Joseph