Witold

Visual Acoustics

Visual Acoustics is an exceptional film about the architectural photographer Julius Schulman and California modernism. It is a reminder of the extent to which photography was important in spreading the idea of modernism, especially since many of the early modernist buildings in Los Angeles and Palm Springs were houses that were not accessible to most people. The film also shows the influence that Schulman’s photography had in portraying modernism not as an abstract ideal but as a backdrop for a certain kind of everyday life—simpler, uncluttered, closer to nature. An interesting comparison of Schulman’s work with that of the other great architectural photographer of the period,

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Megafirms

The big architectural news of the last decade is not the notoriety of starchitects or the Bilbao Effect, it is the growing predominance of the megafirms, multi-city and multi-national practices whose employees number in the thousands, and whose revenues are measured in hundreds of millions of dollars. Large firms date back to McKim, Mead & White in the early twentieth century, and later Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. But in 1920, the widely respected McKim, Mead & White Monograph could be found in drafting rooms across the nation, and SOM, at least in its early days, produced some modern classics such as Lever House,

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Public Rooms

The opening of the expanded Arena Stage theater in Washington, D.C. raises an interesting issue. Philip Johnson once called museums the modern age’s cathedrals, and museum’s are sometimes thought of as the architect’s commission of choice. But a museum is basically a series of display rooms whose architecture is—or should be—subservient to its contents. The reason that places of worship were traditionally the acme of the architect’s art, is that they are (very large) public rooms whose design is usually required to celebrate and elevate their religious function. Theaters, like concert halls and opera houses, are more challenging than museums.

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Schizoid Times

A front-page story in the New York Times describes Masdar, a new city being built on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi. “In Arabian Desert, a Sustainable City Rises, Walled and Lofty,” reads the headline, despite the fact that the accompanying illustrations make it clear that there are no walls, and the most striking characteristic of the architecture is precisely that it is not lofty—buildings are intentionally restricted to 4-6 stories. Architecture critic Nikolai Ouroussoff, who clearly has it in for Foster + Partners, the planners of the new city, maintains that Masdar reflects a “gated-community mentality” (although there do not seem to be any gates) and finds little to praise in this effort to build a zero-carbon city.

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Up Connecticut Avenue

I was attending the monthly meeting of the Commission of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C. That evening I was invited to a dinner party—they still have such things in D.C., a civilized place—by Aviva Kempner, a documentary film-maker (Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg). I would have taken the Metro, but it was raining, and her house is some distance from the station, so I hailed a cab. I’m glad I did. The traffic was as bad as anything I’ve ever seen outside Mexico City, and it took us about an hour to travel five miles, but it gave me a chance to see a part of the city I hadn’t seen before.

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You Can’t Go Home Again

Earlier this summer I gave a graduation speech at my old high school—I am a member of the Class of 1960—in Montreal. I lived and worked here for a long time but moved away seventeen years ago, so I was looking forward to revisiting old haunts. Montreal is a vibrant city, in many ways more European than North American, the sidewalks were crowded with tourists, lots of cafés, the streets criss-crossed with bike paths. But it was no longer my city. My city is the Montreal of the sixties and seventies, the city of Leonard Cohen and Mordecai Richler, of Hungarian restaurants where you could get poppy-seed pancakes and ludlab cake,

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U.S. Embassy

Last week I was in Ottawa for a family funeral, staying in a hotel down the street from the U.S. embassy. The embassy, which succeeds a beautiful building designed by Cass Gilbert in the 1930s, was designed in 1999 by SOM in its post-modernist mode; limestone and stainless steel, neither modern nor really traditional. What struck me was the security barrier that was being built around the building—it looked strong enough to stop a Sherman tank. But this is Ottawa’s ByWard Market, not the Green Zone! Embassies are supposed to stand for national values; this one looks both forbidding and craven.

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Multi-family housing

I recently judged an architecture competition organized by the Southern California Chapter of the Institute for Classical Architecture/Classical America and Habitat for Humanity in Los Angeles. The topic was how to design four houses on a very skinny (typical for LA) ¼-acre lot. The challenge for the architects was not only to accommodate parked cars—this is California, after all—but also how to fulfil home-buyers’ demands in 3-bedroom houses that were about 1,100 square feet. That’s more than 50 percent smaller than the average new home being built this year. Smaller houses are not only more affordable (they not only cost less to build,

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