Witold

Nostalgia of the Infinite

A few weeks ago I wrote about Leon Krier’s auditorium at the University of Miami. Yesterday I came across a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, The Nostalgia of the Infinite, painted in 1912-13. I was struck by the similarity to several towers that Krier has designed, the same classical references, the same evocative mood. Indeed, “nostalgia for the infinite” is not a bad capsule characterization of Krier’s architecture, which seems to long for—not so much another time—as another place.

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How Green is My House

Just as the greenest car is not the one with the most energy-conserving gadgets but the one that is on the road the least, the greenest building is not the one with grass on the roof or a rainwater reservoir in the basement, but the one that lasts the longest. So large is the amount of embodied energy in a building, that the best way to get the most out of it is for the building to remain in use a long, long time. By that measure, the greenest house is the U.S. is the Jonathan Fairbanks house in Dedham,

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Suburbia

If you Google “suburbia” you will get, in this order, a film and a play by Eric Bogosian, a song by Pet Shop Boys, and another film, this one a 1983 Roger Corman production about suburban runaway teens. Further down are two dictionary definitions: “suburbanites considered as a group,” with which I have no problem, and “suburbanites considered as a cultural class,” with which I do. Culture is one of those misused words like community that have lost their meaning. The idea of suburban culture, in particular, is plain silly. Americans (and many other nations) live in suburban areas,

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Lecture Rooms

I have spent many hours of my life teaching in college classrooms. Why are these rooms always so dismal? The worst don’t even have windows. And even when they are spanking new, they inevitably lack a crucial ingredient–architectural character. It is as if their architects, or perhaps it’s the college administrators, had decided that the ideal teaching space had to be neutral, bland, plain vanilla. In fact, the opposite is true. Classrooms should stimulate, not narcotize. I had these thoughts recently as I lectured at the University of Miami school of architecture, whose auditorium is in a building designed several years ago by Leon Krier.

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Miami

Ed Glaeser’s new book on cities has just two index entries for “Miami.” One is a reference to the city providing second-homes for Latin American millionaires, and the other observes that Florida is a low consumer of natural gas, since Miami is warm in the winter. Miami is the nation’s seventh largest metro area, ahead of Washington, D.C. and just behind Houston, but it doesn’t loom large in the national imagination. I’m not sure why that is. It may be the cultural divide—this has definitely become a Latin American outpost on the American mainland. Or it may be the region’s history as a winter getaway—tourism is still the city’s key industry.

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ABCs

“Those who can, do,” observed George Bernard Shaw. “Those who can’t, teach.” As someone who has spent a lifetime teaching I’ve never warmed to that observation. I was reminded of it the other day when I overheard a remark from an architect colleague, who also happens to be a teacher. “The A-students end up teaching,” he said. “The B-students end up working for the C-students.” Other than the fact that grade inflation has virtually eliminated C-students, his observation accords with my own experience. Two of the three top students in my graduating class ended up as teachers; some of the weakest students,

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Saul Bass

I met Saul Bass and his wife Elaine in 1994, at a design conference in  Aspen. He was a sweet man, but I remember being rather in awe of him.  Bass (1920-1996), a graphic designer, had elevated the opening credit sequence of movies into a miniature art form. His credits included the titles (and sometimes the posters) for The Man with the Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder, and Around the World in 80 Days—where the opening sequence was actually at the end. Most of the title sequences were animated,

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Rooftops

My hotel room is on the eleventh floor, looking out over a landscape of downtown rooftops. I am struck by the difference between old and new buildings. The older buildings are crowned by an assortment of pitched roofs, spires, towers, and cupolas. The newer buildings are ingloriously surmounted by—mechanical equipment. In a few cases, the architects have attempted to camouflage the hardware, but these clumsy screens are not much of an improvement. Seen from above, the elevator penthouses, vent stacks, air-conditioning chillers, antennas, and satellite dishes lend the architecture a pathetic air, as if the buildings are so unimportant that anything at all can be dumped on their roofs.

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