COSY GLASS BOX

COSY GLASS BOX

The current exhibition at the Farnsworth House gets rid of all the Mies furniture, which was never a part of the original decor, and recreates the interior as it was when when Dr. Farnsworth actually lived in the house. There are Moroccan rugs  on the travertine floor, and wooden chairs and chaises longues—mostly Scandinavian (Risom, Matthson, Wegner), although the curators didn’t hang stuff on the pristine primavera as the good doctor did. I notice that she turned the   freestanding closet ninety degrees to create a more intimate bedroom (there is such a thing as too much glass). The result is a revelation—the house is, if not cosy, at least humane. A home, not a shrine to the architect. I hope they keep it that way.

WHAT’S NEXT

WHAT’S NEXT

Last week, the University of Pennsylvania announced plans to remove its statue of George Whitefield, a famous eighteenth-century British preacher, due to his condoning slavery. What was the statue, made by R. Tait McKenzie in 1919, doing at Penn? Whitefield was a lifelong friend of Benjamin Franklin, the founder of the university. Moreover, as the Penn website notes: “Franklin chose the Whitefield meeting house, with its Charity School, to be purchased as the site of the newly formed Academy of Philadelphia which opened in 1751, followed in 1755 with the College of Philadelphia, both the predecessors of the University of Pennsylvania.” Apparently Franklin, who published several of the preacher’s texts, was more tolerant than his successors. But the mob has its own reasons, or in this case putative reasons, for Penn’s action appears to have been preventative. Whitefield had to go. But what’s next? Architecture often assumes a commemorative function, must it, too, be cancelled in this misbegotten attempt to rewrite history? If Jefferson and Washington are suspect, what about their homes, Monticello and Mount Vernon. To make matters worse, the houses were built with slave labor. The architecture of both was influenced by the prevailing eighteenth-century fashion for Classicism, a style that originated in ancient Rome and Greece. Both were slave-owning societies, so no doubt temple pediments and Ionic columns will sooner or later be called into question, too.

ANYTHING GOES

ANYTHING GOES

It was the great Cole Porter’s birthday on June 9. In 1934 he wrote the musical Anything Goes. 

The world has gone mad today
And good’s bad today
And black’s white today
And day’s night today . . .
And though I’m not a great romancer
I know that you’re bound to answer
When I propose
Anything goes

Seems about right.

AT THE PEARLY GATES

AT THE PEARLY GATES

I note that Christo Javacheff passed away recently. I was not a fan of his work. On the occasion of his and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates project in Central Park I wrote in 2005 in Slate: “Jeanne-Claude has been quoted as saying that she thinks that Olmsted would be “very happy” with the installation. My guess is that he would have hated it.”

THE THIN VENEER

THE THIN VENEER

The veneer of civilization is perilously thin. I was living in Montreal during the 1969 policemen and firemen’s strike. It lasted only sixteen hours but that was long enough for things to unravel. For the first half day, drivers observed traffic light signals, then they started to go through orange lights, and pretty soon they were disregarding red lights altogether. That was only the beginning. According to the CBC, which called it a night of terror: “At first, the strike’s impact was limited to more bank robberies than normal. But as night fell, a taxi drivers’ union seized upon the police absence to violently protest a competitor’s exclusive right to airport  . . . Shattered shop windows and a trail of broken glass are evidence of looting that erupted in the downtown core. With no one to stop them, students and separatists joined the rampage.” Looting was widespread; a provincial policeman was shot and killed. (Those calling for defunding the police should study the Montreal example.) Another example. The New York City 1977 blackout started in the evening and lasted all night and most of the following day. The result was extensive lawlessness, looting, and arson. Thirty five blocks of Broadway were destroyed. More than five hundred police officers were injured and almost four thousand looters were arrested. The cost of damages was estimated to be more than a billion dollars in present-day dollars.

 

MOVING THE BOX

MOVING THE BOX

Blair Kamin, the architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, recently tweeted a May 19  photograph of Mies van der Rohe’s famous Farnsworth House almost inundated by the rising waters of the nearby Fox River. Kamin writes that the water level appears to be receding, so it seems likely that the house may be spared, at least this year. Although its floor is raised five feet in the air, because Mies sited the house on low ground only 75 feet from a river that regularly overflows its banks in the spring, the house has been flooded several times, the first as early as 1954, only three years after it was built. A 1996 flood brought several feet of water into the house and blew out a window. One solution, because the house is basically a (glass) box on stilts, would be to move the whole thing to higher ground on the property. Instead, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the current owner, is considering installing hydraulic jacks that will raise the house whenever the river floods. The rationale for this contraption, is that changing the location of the house would compromise the architect’s vision. The truth is that Mies designed the same steel and glass boxes irrespective of their setting and location—urban or rural, Montreal or Mexico City. “It’s ridiculous to claim that the house’s siting is essential to its authenticity, especially given Mies’s basic approach to universality,” says my Penn colleague David De Long, an architect and experienced preservationist who has consulted on the conservation of several Frank Lloyd Wright houses, including Auldbrass in South Carolina. “Wright’s houses, which were more specifically designed for a specific site, have been successfully moved without major compromise,” he points out.

A PRIVATE FUTURE

A PRIVATE FUTURE

In 1973, my friend Martin Pawley published The Private Future: Causes and Consequences of Community Collapse in the West. According to his  Guardian obituary (he died in 2008) the book “foresaw a society with ever greater technical means of communication becoming paradoxically more insular and dysfunctional.” Here is an extract (which appeared in full on the jacket of the original hardcover): “Alone in a centrally heated, air-conditioned capsule, drugged, fed with music and erotic imagery, the parts of his consciousness separated into components that reach everywhere and nowhere, the private citizen of the future will become one with the end of effort and the triumph of sensation divorced from action. When the barbarians arrive they will find him like some ancient Greek sage, lost in contemplation, terrified and yet fearless, listening to himself.” The Private Future was written before the internet, iPods, and smart phones. Martin expected a publishing success but the message was too farfetched—and too bleakly dystopian—for  the reading public. In our time of social distancing and self-quarantining the book seems more apposite than ever.

i-BAUHAUS

i-BAUHAUS

Nicholas Fox Webber, the author of a biography of Le Corbusier, has recently published iBauhaus. I have not read the book yet, but the subtitle, “The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design,” says it all. There is no doubt that the iPhone is a minimalist, no frills machine and proud of it. It is also a quintessentially Bauhaus example of form follows predetermined aesthetics rather than form follows function. The iPhone doesn’t fit the human hand particularly well, certainly not as well as the classic Western Telephone Model 500 handset designed by Henry Dreyfuss in the 1940s. The predecessor of the Model 500 was the Western Electric Model 300 designed by Bell Labs engineer George Lum in the early 1930s, about the same time that the Bauhaus school moved to Berlin. I have an iPhone, and I’ve had a Wassily Chair and I formed no attachment to either.

POST-PANDEMIC

POST-PANDEMIC

According to the United Nations Secretary-General, the coronavirus pandemic is the “greatest test” the world has faced since the United Nations was formed in the wake of the Second World War. One of the results of that global war was the ascendancy of modernist architecture, which until then had been a distinctly Bohemian side show of little import. It was not until the postwar 1950s that steel and glass office towers and precast concrete housing blocks appeared—and came to dominate the built environment. One wonders if a post-pandemic world will see a comparable phenomenon. Of course, a plague does not materially lay waste cities, but its debilitating social, economic, and human effects could be as drastic. 

RULES

RULES

A friend of mine recently emailed me a telling criticism of New Urbanism. “I’ve noticed a strange need to quantify everything from these guys. It’s almost like they are trying to deduce a pattern . . .  and even worse . .  many would lean toward  legislating the pattern.” There it is in a nutshell. Of course, ever since Palladio wrote Quattro Libri, architects have been fascinated by the dimensions of things—of rooms, ceilings, doors, windows, and so on. Palladio had rules about all of them. But he was always careful to allow for exceptions. Writing about the height of ceiling vaults, for example, he observed, “There are other heights for vaults which do not come under any rule, and the architect will make use of these according to his judgement and practical circumstances.” Judgement, not legislated patterns.