Witold

VENERATION

I recently spoke in Charleston at the first national meeting of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. The ICAA is, in its own words, “committed to promoting and preserving the practice, understanding, and appreciation of classical design.” Exactly what is “classical design”? According to Wiki, “classical architecture usually denotes architecture which is more or less consciously derived from the principles of Greek and Roman architecture of classical antiquity.” That is the art historical definition, but judging from the Professional Portfolio regularly published in the ICAA’s journal, The Classicist, Gothic, Moderne, Art Deco, and various vernacular residential styles such as Shingle Style,

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MULTIPLE EXPRESSION

I heard a new architectural term today: “multiple expression.” It refers to changing the architectural style of the facade of a large building to make it appear to be two or more smaller buildings. This strikes me as profoundly un-architectural. It’s true that architects in the past have sometimes combined different styles to give the impression that a building grew by accretion over a long period—Addison Mizner did this in his shopping alley in Palm Beach. But this had to do with chronology, not size. Generally architects have welcomed the challenge of designing a looong facade, whether it was Bernini in St.

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LOOKING BACK

For some reason the YouTube algorithm has been sending me videos of my old lectures: a recent lecture at Penn on ornament, a 2002 Toronto ideacity talk on Palladio, a 2013 talk at McGill University on architecture,and a talk about the history of the chair at the New York School of Interior Design. In 2011 I gave a lecture at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. The occasion was the publishing of Makeshift Metropolis, a book about the ideas—good and bad—that have influenced the planning of our cities over the twentieth century.

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CAREERS

Moshe Safdie has just donated his architectural archive of correspondence, drawings, and models, as well as his apartment in Habitat, to his alma mater, McGill University. His is a remarkable career, not least for its long span. Of course Safdie started young, he was only 29 when Habitat—his first project!—propelled him into the limelight. Most architects who experience a break-out project do so at a relatively advanced age—Louis Kahn was 52 when he came to the public’s attention, Frank Gehry was 49. Edwin Lutyens, an exception like Safdie, skipped school and designed his first house at 18, and was nationally known by the time he reached his mid-30s (he died at 74).

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REVIVALS VS. TRANSPLANTS

Revivalism in architecture refers to a style that consciously echoes or evokes the style of a previous era. This blurs an important distinction. The Italian Renaissance and the British Gothic Revival were echoing the styles of earlier eras, earlier local eras. The Greek Revival, on the other hand, whether it occurred in Berlin, Edinburgh, or Philadelphia, was a foreign style from far away; it was a transplant. That did not mean that it was less authentic, but it did give it a different meaning. When Robert A. M. Stern built Franklin and Murray colleges at Yale in 2017, he was reviving James Gamble Rogers’s Collegiate Gothic of the previous century. But Rogers had not revived a local tradition; his inspiration was a collection of postcards and photographs of Oxbridge colleges (that he had not visited). He was transplanting.

WEIRDOS

A “nation of weirdos” is how Michael Brendan Doherty characterized the United States the other day on The Editors Fourth of July podcast. It was meant kindly. The weirdos have included Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs, as well as the inventors of the hula hoop, the smoothie, and the pet rock. The pursuit of happiness takes many unexpected twists and turns.

DECADENCE

I was listening to some old interviews on Tyler Cowen’s podcast, Conversations with Tyler, and came across this one, with Ross Douthat, made in March, 2020. Douthat made this observation about architecture: “I would say that, basically, the place that modern architecture has ended up and the traditionalist alternative are both sort of decadent . . .” I found that interesting, since modernism and traditionalism are usually described as a divide rather than as evidence of the same thing. Decadence in modernism is apparent in the (fruitless) search for unceasing novelty, that takes architects into increasingly obscure ratholes.

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HIS MASTER’S VOICE

An odd thing happened to me the other day. I was talking to someone and I used an expression that I had never used before, but was something that Shirley might have a said. Even as I spoke I recognized her voice and for a weird split-second I felt like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Not necessarily a bad thing, I thought to myself.

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