Witold

Slumdog Entrepreneur

Jim Yardley has an excellent story in the New York Times on Dharavi, a large Bombay slum. It is not clear exactly how many people live in Dharavi—probably no one is quite sure—but it is reported that there are estimated to be 60,000 dwellings, but since a slum household can be anything from 2 to 20 persons, that is not much help. What is sure is that the slum, while lacking basic infrastructure is a hive of activity. One resident entrepreneur estimates Dharavi’s annual economic output is between $600 million and $1 billion. When I was researching slums for a Canadian aid project,

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Architects and Fashion

Architects have a love-hate relationship with fashion. On the one hand, becoming fashionable can catapult an architect’s career, bringing not only recognition but also, more importantly, commissions. But fashion giveth, and fashion taketh away, and becoming unfashionable can stop a career in its tracks. Philip Johnson, always with one finger to the winds of fashion, dealt with its fickleness by embracing it: moving from Miesian modernism, to ersatz classicism, to postmodernism, to deconstructivism. See his compound—architectural zoo?—at New Canaan. But most architects have deeper convictions than Johnson, even when fashion abandons them. Steadfastness can lead to obscurity,

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Tales of the City

More than half of the world’s population is now urban, a famous factoid. City boosters tend to play fast and loose with this statistic, as if it represents the triumph of the city, and more than half of the world’s population now lives in a combination of Manhattan and Singapore. Of  course, they don’t. The majority of urban Americans either live in suburbs, or in new cities–Phoenix, Seattle, Houston–whose character is distinctly suburban. Nevertheless, Richard Florida’s article in the October issue of the Atlantic segues from global urbanization to the virtues of density, closeness, and human interaction in concentrated cities.

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Nude Pei

I. M. Pei’s East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. is currently undergoing repairs. The cladding of the 33-year-old building is being entirely re-hung to rectify a problem with the anchors that support the marble slabs, a project that is expected to take four years and cost an astounding $85 million. It’s worth taking a look at Pei’s denuded building. The familiar triangular prisms turn out to be concrete frames in-filled with brick, quite unlike the effete geometry that we are used to. It is as if a businessman removed his pin-striped suit to reveal a muscle shirt.

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Learning to Design

In a filmed interview, Denise Scott Brown observed that learning to design was similar to learning how to ride a bicycle—you got on, fell off, got back on, and by the end of the day you were riding. The implication is that design—like bicycle riding—can be learned, but it cannot be taught. Allan Greenberg made much the same point to me in a recent conversation. If law was taught like architecture, he said, law students would spend all their time in moot court, but moot court actually plays a very small role in a legal education. Many accomplished architects did not attend an architecture school—Edwin Lutyens,

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The Third Client

An interesting comment by Jaquelin Robertson who was on a panel at the recent “Reconsidering Postmodernism” conference in New York. He observed that an architect has three clients. There is, obviously, the real client who is paying for the building. The second is the client inside you, the one who says “I want this, let’s do that.” According to Robertson this is a client you shouldn’t listen to. The third client is a person whom you’ve never met. Years from now, someone walks by the building and thinks, “How nice. Someone actually thought of that.” In a conversation later, Jaq pointed out to me that the real reason the old are revered in China is not that they are wiser,

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Jazz on Trafalgar Square

It’s exactly twenty years since Venturi Scott Brown completed the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London. After visiting the museum last weekend, I am still impressed. The sheen of newness is gone now, and the architects’ intentions are all the more visible: to make an addition that continues the 1830s building, and is also itself. Venturi explains that the rhythm of the pilasters on the façade is meant to be a jazzy riff on Wilkins’s staid minuet. The sometimes arch mannerist gestures seem a little tired, but the resolute attention to detail and construction (so rare today) remains affecting,

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Playground Cities

On a recent visit to Charleston, a local complained to me that the city was in danger of becoming New Orleans, that is, a playground city. The tiny historic peninsula between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, whose resident population below the Crosstown Expressway is about 20,000, is inundated with tourists (an average of about 12,000 per day), and day-visitors from mammoth cruise ships. Many of the homeowners are absentee landlords for whom the charming place is merely an occasional pied-à-terre. But New Orleans has a gritty decadence that prim Charleston lacks. If I were living in Charleston, I would cast a wary eye on Venice,

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