Architects

Kahn Without Kahn

The FDR Memorial on Roosevelt Island is nearing completion. I am of two minds about this undertaking, which is based on the design that Louis Kahn was working on when he died in March 1974. It was, literally, his last project. There are so precious few Kahn works, that who could object to one more? But as David De Long, who co-curated the major 1991 exhibition on Kahn observes, “Posthumous realizations are always very, very risky.” They are particularly risky in the case of Kahn, who was famous for making last-minute changes, often after construction had started—to the consternation of his office staff,

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The Royal Business

My friend Marc Appleton recently recommended a book by Royal Barry Wills. Wills (1895-1962), a Massachusetts native, was an architect (though his MIT degree was in engineering) who in the 1930s popularized the Cape Cod cottage and was a well-known residential designer. In 1938, LIFE magazine invited several architects to design modern and traditional houses; actual families would then chose one to build. Wills prevailed over no less than Frank Lloyd Wright. Wills’s book is the long out-of-print This Business of Architecture, originally published in 1941. It contains chapters titled “Stalking and Capturing of Clients” and “Design Within the Owner’s Budget.” The book is illustrated with Wills’s delightful drawings,

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The Rude Building

From the Plus Ca Change Desk.

Have people read A. Trystan Edwards? Edwards (1884-1973) was a Welsh architect and town planner who studied at Liverpool, and articled under Sir Reginald Bloomfield. In 1924 he published an extraordinary book, Good and Bad Manners in Architecture that discusses many of the issues currently raised by the current New Urbanism movement. You can get an idea of the book from the frontis page: “This book asks the novel question, How do buildings behave towards one another? It contrasts the selfish building,

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Channeling Keisler

My friend Hugh Hartwell sent me a link to a CNN Money story on the late Dick Clark’s house in Malibu. The organic grotto-like home, designed by architect Phillip Jon Brown, is inevitably described by the media as a Fred Flintstone-style house. It really is a version of an idea pioneered by the Austrian architect Frederick Keisler (1890-1965). Keisler was born in what is now Ukraine, studied in Vienna, knew Loos, and was a member of the De Stijl group. In 1926, he moved to New York City, where he lived the rest of his life,

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Our John Soane

This weekend’s Washington Post magazine has a cover story on Frank Gehry and his design for the Eisenhower memorial. Philip Kennicott has done a fine job explaining the ins and outs on this only-in-Washington teapot tempest, but what struck me was the wonderful photo by Matt McClain of Gehry in his LA studio, surrounded by architectural models. It captures not only the architect’s working method, and the intensity of exploration that the scores of models represent, but also the sense of this remarkable artist in his own world. It reminds me of Joseph Michael Gandy’s 1818 painting of a room piled full with models of all the buildings designed by John Soane,

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NAMOC

An architectural competition for the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) is currently underway. The site of the vast (128,000 m2) museum is Beijing, not far from Herzog & de Meuron’s Olympic stadium. This promises to be one of the largest and most ambitious museums since the Getty Center and the Bilbao Guggenheim. Judging from some websites, unsuccessful entrants in the first stage included Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture and Ben van Berkel’s UNStudio. Not clear who else competed, but one supposes the usual suspects. Four firms have reached the final stage: Gehry Partners, Ateliers Jean Nouvel,

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Rough on Rudolph

The New York Times article about the Paul Rudolph county government center in Goshen, N.Y. that is threatened with demolition, has fueled a keen (and since this is 2012, a rather rude) debate. Many conservationists’ attitude to old buildings is that they should be treated like art, that is, carefully preserved. The problem is that buildings, unlike paintings, are fixed in place. Art that falls out of favor doesn’t have to be destroyed, it can simply be taken out of the front room and put in the back, or in a museum’s open storage,

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Great Clients

Following a recent lecture at the School of Visual Arts in New York, a D/Crit student asked me an interesting question. I had been speaking about the important role that a client can play in the architectural process, specifically how Robert Sainsbury had influenced a young Norman Foster—not least by commissioning him—in the design of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich. But what about public clients, the student asked, could the public also be a great client? It is a good question. The history of architecture contains many examples of influential individual clients—Fr. Marie-Alain Couturier at both Ronchamp and La Tourette,

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