Witold

FEELING GOOD

Walking down a corridor of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia I came across a decorative mosaic panel hanging on the wall. An accompanying label explains that it is a portion of the lobby floor of the Elm Building, which was demolished in 1981 to make room for the building in which I’m standing. The Elm Building was built by the hospital in 1901, a photograph on the hospital website shows an attractive one-story brick and limestone building with a pedimented temple front. Clearly a building of some consequence, it housed administration offices and an assembly room. The unidentified architect took trouble with the lobby floor,

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THE RIGHT STUFF

The Associated Press reports that President Emanuelle Macron has approved a plan to rebuild the roof and spire of Notre-Dame cathedral exactly as it was before last year’s fire. Hurrah! That means an oaken structure supporting a lead roof and a spire according to the nineteenth-century design of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. A thousand three-foot diameter oaks are being felled to provide the timber, which must be allowed to season for at least eighteen months. According to the cathedral’s rector, Patrick Chauvet, the entire reconstruction is expected to take ten to fifteen years.

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ROLL OVER BEETHOVEN

A musician friend sent me a recent article in the Telegraph reporting that “Musical notation has been branded ‘colonialist’ by Oxford professors hoping to reform their courses to focus less on white European culture . . . Academics are deconstructing the university’s music offering after facing pressure to ‘decolonise’    the curriculum following the Black Lives Matter protests.” According to the British newspaper, music professors said the classical repertoire taught at Oxford, which spans works by Mozart and Beethoven, focuses too much on ‘white European music from the slave period.’” Actually, Habsburg Austria-Hungary, where the pair lived and worked,

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THE TROPICAL SHIRT

In a colloquium that took place during the 2016 Driehaus Prize ceremonies in Chicago, Andrés Duany made an interesting observation. He pointed out that Florida Panhandle resort towns such as Seaside, Rosemary Beach, and Alys Beach—all planned by his firm DPZ—were actually urban experimental testbeds with potentially long-term effects. “Americans are willing in the circumscription of a resort experience to try anything,” he said. He speculated that the people who holidayed in these walkable, dense, traditionally designed resort towns—so different from their everyday suburban communities—were affected, that is changed, by the experience. Now, I’m a great admirer of the Seaside prototype,

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PLUS ÇA CHANGE

As one gets older one tends to spend an inordinate amount of time visiting hospitals. Ours is Pennsylvania Hospital, which bills itself as “the first in the nation” and was co-founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1751. The original building was designed in 1754 by Franklin’s friend, Samuel Rhoads (1711-84), a self-taught carpenter/architect. Rhoads, who was later a delegate to the First Continental Congress and would serve as the city’s mayor, laid out two wings connected to a central pavilion. Only the east wing, a sturdy Georgian brick structure, was built before the Revolution. The west wing and the central pavilion,

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THE PAST AND THE FUTURE

I was listening to a podcast of “The Remnant” the other day, on which Jonah Goldberg made the observation that while political conservatives have usually gotten their ideals from the past, progressives have looked to the future. It struck me how much this applied to the history of architecture. Architecture has traditionally been conservative, not only because buildings were expensive and had to last a long time, but also because clients—the monarchy, the Church, and the merchant class—were conservative. For centuries, architectural ideals were rooted in ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages. This began to change at the end of the nineteenth century,

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URBAN DISCONTINUITIES

Transect Urbanism is a collection of essays that describe a seminal idea of the New Urbanism movement. The concept is roughly based on observations made by Alexander von Humboldt, a nineteenth-century Prussian naturalist and Patrick Geddes, a twentieth-century Scottish biologist. Geddes was a pioneering urban planner and his Valley Section drawing of 1909 was the basis for a theory postulated by Andrés Duany a century later. Duany’s Rural-to-Urban Transect describes a smooth continuum of six zones—Natural, Rural, Sub-Urban, General Urban, Urban Center, Urban Core—from less to more dense, and from less to more urbanized. Perhaps it is the exception that proves the rule,

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POST-MODERNIST

The headline in Hugh Newell Jacobsen’s obituary in the New York Times describes him as a “famed modernist.” Famed he was, especially as the designer of exquisite high-end houses, but to call him a modernist is inaccurate. He was, rather, a post-modernist. That other post-modern master, James Stirling, was critical of mainstream modernism.  “The language itself was so reductive that only exceptional people could design modern buildings in a way that was interesting,” he said.“It got stuck and it will have to unstick itself to move one.” Stirling’s unsticking involved broadening the language by introducing historicist motifs and color.

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