Witold

GOING ON

Years ago, when Shirley and I lived in Quebec, we regularly took a few days off during the winter to stay at a country inn in the Laurentians, north of Montreal. It was run by a German family, and the hearty food—schnitzel and kartoffelklöße—was a big part of the attraction. So was the cross-country skiing. We could ski out of the front door of our house in Hemmingford, but it was quite flat so hilly terrain was more fun. The trails were long and the area was quite wild. One day we went out, and after several hours I had to admit that we were quite lost.

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MEMORIES

Last week I visited Planting Fields, a Jazz Age estate on Long Island’s Gold Coast. The house was completed in 1921, designed by Alexander Stewart Walker (1876–1952) and Leon Narcisse Gillette (1878–1945), whose Manhattan firm was responsible for several Long Island country houses. The style of the house is usually described as Tudor Revival. Walking around the sprawling mansion I was reminded why historical revival styles were so popular for so long. To begin with, the house is not really a recreation of a particular historical period. There are half-timbered parts, limestone parts, and an entry that reminded me of Christopher Wren.

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JUST A SERVICE ENTRANCE

I think it was Christopher Alexander who I once heard observe that everything in our surroundings—everything—either raises our spirits or dampens them. It may only be a notch or two, but every thing we look at makes us feel either slightly better or slightly worse. My afternoon walk often takes me past the rear of the Board of Education Building in Philadelphia, and a detail in that building always gives me a lift. It’s the service entrance. I know that’s what it is because the name is elegantly carved into the stone door frame. The building was designed in 1930 in a style sometimes called Moderne,

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A PAST WORTH SAVING

The historic preservation movement, as I think Vincent Scully once pointed out, was the most powerful expression of public interest in architecture of the twentieth century. But the truth is that the historic preservation movement was not really about preserving the past; people did not want to save Penn Station because it was old, or because it was an expression of a particular era. They wanted to save it because it was beautiful, beautifully conceived and beautifully built. The four decades between 1900 and 1940 were a magical period in American architecture. Comparable, as Augustus Saint-Gaudens observed, to the Italian Renaissance—a perfect joining of money,

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A GOOD CAUSE

Home: A Celebration, just published by Rizzoli, is a beautiful book in a good cause; it’s a fundraiser for No Kid Hungry. The interior decorator Charlotte Moss has brought together essays, poems, sketches, and photographs by a variety of authors, including Joyce Carol Oates, Isaac Mizrahi, Annie Leibovitz, Julian Fellowes, Bette Midler, John Grisham, and Alice Waters. There are a few architects, too: Marc Appleton, Michael Imber, Tom Kligerman. And yours truly.

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MISPRINT

A breathless article in the New York Times writes: “Mr. Hernández and his family are moving to a new home on the outskirts of Nacajuca, Mexico: a sleek, 500-square-foot building with two bedrooms, a finished kitchen and bath, and indoor plumbing. What’s most unusual about the home is that it was made with an 11-foot-tall three-dimensional printer.” Housing crisis? No problem, high tech comes to the rescue! The  report is rather sparse on details, but as far as I can make out, the 3D  printer spits out the walls and partitions using “Lavacrete,” a concrete-like material.

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COMFORT

“And really, isn’t that what design is meant to do? Challenge us, provoke us, unsettle our expectations. Comfort is welcome. But discomfort can be, too,” concludes a recent editorial in the New York Times’ T Magazine. Oh, really? That’s what design is meant to do? A certain kind of architect and designer—or in this case, magazine editor—considers comfort to be the equivalent of complacency. Or is this just a rationalization, a way to justify exposing concrete, painting surfaces black, leaving out upholstery? No one should confuse comfort with good design; comfort is not sufficient,

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INSTRUCTION AND INSPIRATION

A reader recently wrote to me citing Frank Lloyd Wright as a model for the future. “Wright’s discipline itself offers us an antidote to the wandering efforts of rudderless students: it can be understood and undertaken by those with a little personal aptitude and a readiness for hard work to design buildings of real point, character, freshness, and charm.” How likely is a Wright Revival? Historical examples of revivals abound: Inigo Jones revived Palladio, Wren revived Bramante, Lutyens revived Wren. More recently, Richard Meier launched his career by reviving early Corbusier, Tadao Ando learned a lot from Kahn, and Thomas Phifer has revisited Mies.

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