Witold

Bon Appétit

My wife is a Québecoise, and when we sit down at the table we always say “Bon appétit.” When I visit Germany it’s “Guten Appetit,” and in Italy, “Buon appetito.” Omniglot.com lists similar expressions in scores of languages, including Kazakh, Korean and Klingon, but observes that “There is no exact English equivalent.”  The most I’ve heard said before a meal in English is grace. My parents were observant Roman Catholics but we never said  grace, and the only time I remember grace was the year I spent in a Jesuit boarding school. According to the OED, the custom of saying grace (usually in Latin) was adapted by the early Christians from the Greeks,

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McMansion

My friend Stan Runyan sent me this photograph the other day. Stan, an architect, collects photos of extravagant houses, what most people call McMansions. Wiki defines McMansion as “a pejorative term for a large new house which is judged as pretentious, tasteless, or badly designed for its neighborhood.” I’ve argued elsewhere that it is not so much size that is an issue as design—or rather, it’s lack. Look at this cabane. It has columns, but they’re too tall. It has gables, but too many of them. It has quoins, but they are too prominent. And the picture windows seem to have been lifted from a 1960s ranch house.

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A Prize for Robert A. M. Stern

Robert A. M. Stern brings glamor to this year’s Driehaus Prize. Glamor is something the Driehaus sorely needs. Founded in 2003 by Chicago investment manager Richard H. Driehaus, the prize is intended to balance that other Chicago architectural award, the Pritzker Prize. While the Pritzker is relentlessly avant-garde in its selections, the Driehaus honors classical architecture and traditional urbanism. Although the public generally favors traditional over modernist architecture, the Driehaus Prize has not had a high profile. Maybe having two major architecture prizes is simply one too many, or maybe the Pritzker simply staked out the “Nobel prize of architecture” territory first.

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The Irish Dream

A photograph accompanying an article in the New York Times on the troubled Irish economy shows a planned community with a street of unfinished houses, their construction halted by the slump. What surprised me was their appearance. Despite being in a different culture, and being constructed out of different materials—solid brick rather than a wood frame—the houses could have been in an American suburb. They exhibited the same traditional domestic features: pitched roofs, dormers, divided lights. Many reports about the bursting Irish housing bubble refer darkly to “McMansions,” but that is hardly the case with these modest houses on what appear to be small lots.

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No Cause for Celebration

A murder in  Florida received prominent coverage in the New York Times, which referred to “a crack in the facade of this community.” Celebration was developed by the Disney Company 14 years ago (although it no longer belongs to the entertainment conglomerate), and it has received inordinate attention from the media ever since. There is something about the combination of Disney and an actual town that fascinates reporters, although Celebration is a fairly run-of-the-mill (actually above average) example of what is usually called New Urbanism. When the place opened, journalists said it was too perfect,

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School


I drove by an old school today in northeast Philadelphia. I recognized immediately that it was a school, even before I read the name inscribed over the entrance: Woodrow Wilson Public School. What an entrance! The four Composite columns of the portico rose fully two stories high, supporting a balcony which I assume was off the principal’s office—or should have been. The wings on both sides stretched out in a regular beat of brick pilasters and tall classroom windows. The school opened in 1928 (Wilson died in 1924). What struck me about the building was not its Classical style and solid construction—that was simply how one built public buildings in those days—but rather the evident status of public education that the architecture conveyed.

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Greek Revival in Athens

I was in Athens, Georgia to deliver a lecture at the university when I came across The News Building, a work by  Allan Greenberg that I had previously seen only in photographs. Modern classicism is most commonly found in private residences, sometimes on campuses, but rarely in commercial buildings such as this one: a newspaper plant and offices. A large portico with exceptionally fat, unfluted Doric columns, marks the main entrance and leads to a two-storey lobby that is a remarkable exercise in polychromy; the colors are almost shocking. The precast concrete and brick building is 18 years-old.

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The Olmsted Legacy

If The Olmsted Legacy, a one-hour documentary on the great landscape architect is playing in your area don’t miss it. It includes interviews with many Olmsted scholars (including yours truly) and is an excellent introduction to a man who influenced not only the way that we live in cities, suburbs and even wilderness, but also the way that we think about nature.

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