Witold

How the Other Half Builds

An op-ed in today’s New York Times, by Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava of Mumbai, comments on a proposal for a $300 house as a solution for slum-dwellers in Third World countries. The authors correctly criticize the idea. Architects never cease to be fascinated by “minimal” housing (preferably prefab), and a $300 house sounds like the housing equivalent of the $100 one-laptop-per-child computer. But it isn’t. Twenty-five years ago, when I was doing research on slums in Indore, we discovered several interesting facts that contradicted the conventional thinking about how the poor live (available as a report,

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The Paradox of Travel

Good food is a reason to visit Belgium. With the U.S. dollar in decline we’ve been eating in brasseries rather than two-star restaurants, but there have been some memorable meals during our stay in Ghent. The service at the Pakhuis was somewhat perfunctory, but the pig’s knuckle took me back to the taverns of my youth in Montreal, and the setting–a converted warehouse–was interesting. The Café Théatre, next to the opera house on the Kouter, is an elegant place whose  daily lunch special is a bargain.  They  served the best frieten of our trip—no small thing for French fries are the national dish,

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Art Nouveau

The standard rap on Art Nouveau, as I remember from my student art history books, is that it was a short-lived (roughly 1890-1905) hiatus between the historic revival styles of the nineteenth century and the true-blue modernism of the Bauhaus. Art Nouveau was largely pooh-poohed,, written off as an aesthetic dead-end that sprang full-blown from the (feverish) artistic imaginations of architects and designers such as Antonio Gaudi, Victor Horta, Hector Guimard, the young Peter Behrens, Louis Comfort Tiffany and (though he is usually not included in this company), Louis Sullivan. The problem for art historians is that the sinuous decorations of the style obviously have little to do with the abstract minimalism of the Modern Movement.

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In Ghent

We’re in Ghent for a 10-day holiday. The old part of the city is crowded with bicycles, cars, trams and pedestrians. There don’t seem to be many rules. The trams have precedence, otherwise there is an uneasy but generally polite truce between everyone else. This is also true of the architecture. The streetscape is a mixture of medieval stepped-gable houses, Baroque and Classical residences, Gothic churches, and Art Deco public buildings. Perhaps Camillo Sitte could make sense of it; I can’t. It’s just all jumbled together in a pleasant oleo. I suppose there is a historical commission here,

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Developer in Chief

There are many things that can be said about Donald Trump’s apparent presidential bid, but one cannot say that his background in real estate makes it unprecedented. We have had presidents who were engineers, storekeepers, actors, soldiers, and community organizers, and yes, at least one developer. Quite a distinguished one. Although the idealized image of George Washington is of a farmer and soldier, he was also a major land developer. Trained as a surveyor, early in his career he took part in a land company that controlled half a million acres west of the Alleghenies. When he was about 40,

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The Master Builder

Earlier this week the architect Bing Thom and I had a public “conversation” at the New York Public Library, on the occasion of the launch of his new book. I have known Bing since we were both architecture students, he in Vancouver and I in Montreal. He was honored this year with the Gold Medal of the Royal Architects Institute of Canada. Thom is unusual in today’s world of branded, globe-trotting architects. He hand picks projects, and often turns down clients. He doesn’t have a signature style. And his buildings demonstrate a sense of craftsmanship and technical innovation that has become rare.

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Kahn

In a recent interview in the Huffington Post, Boston architectural critic Robert Campbell makes a striking comment: “Since the death of Kahn way back in the 1970s I’m not sure we have a figure of comparable standing.” When I read this I was at first taken aback. Kahn is one of the great American architects, up there with Mies, Wright, Richardson, and Jefferson, but in forty years have there really been no successors? On reflection, I think Campbell is right. No one in Kahn’s generation—not Saarinen, Rudolph, or Pei—quite measures up. Certainly not that great dilettante, Philip Johnson.

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Montreal Madness

The quaintly-named Quartier des Spectacles is a 250-acre entertainment district in downtown Montreal, currently one of the largest urban redevelopment project in a North American City. Unlike 1960s urban renewal, the apparent centerpiece is not low-income housing or office towers but arts and entertainment. The Quartier includes the Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Theatre School of Canada, and many existing performance halls, as well as outdoor spaces for the now dozens of festivals that have made Montreal a world leader in the visual and performing arts. The recently-built Bibliothèqe Nationale, a rather cheerless glass box,

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