Architects

The work of Pei Cobb Freed was never that exciting, at least not after Pei retired, but the firm produced serious, well-executed modernist designs. Nothing to sneer at. So what is one to make of its latest project, 1045 Avenue of the Americas, a 28-story office building overlooking Bryant Park? A “modern hourglass-shaped structure” is how the New York Times described it. A “tepid Frank Gehry wannabe” would be another way of putting it. With the Beekman Tower, Gehry raised the bar, or perhaps moved the hurdle, and so we get this. It reminds me of a building on the University of Pennsylvania campus,

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I regularly get announcements from architects’ publicists announcing new buildings. Sometimes the proposed design is part of the announcement, sometimes it is merely the appointment of the architect that is considered “news.” But is it? If (insert your favorite architect here) has won a commission, well, good for them, but most of us are really only interested when a building is actually built, not in the pretty pictures. Robert Hughes once wrote that slides are to real art as phone sex is to real sex. Computer-generated drawings are like that, too. Having said that, it is true that some unbuilt projects have been influential in the history of architecture.

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There are many things that can be said about Donald Trump’s apparent presidential bid, but one cannot say that his background in real estate makes it unprecedented. We have had presidents who were engineers, storekeepers, actors, soldiers, and community organizers, and yes, at least one developer. Quite a distinguished one. Although the idealized image of George Washington is of a farmer and soldier, he was also a major land developer. Trained as a surveyor, early in his career he took part in a land company that controlled half a million acres west of the Alleghenies. When he was about 40,

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Earlier this week the architect Bing Thom and I had a public “conversation” at the New York Public Library, on the occasion of the launch of his new book. I have known Bing since we were both architecture students, he in Vancouver and I in Montreal. He was honored this year with the Gold Medal of the Royal Architects Institute of Canada. Thom is unusual in today’s world of branded, globe-trotting architects. He hand picks projects, and often turns down clients. He doesn’t have a signature style. And his buildings demonstrate a sense of craftsmanship and technical innovation that has become rare.

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In a recent interview in the Huffington Post, Boston architectural critic Robert Campbell makes a striking comment: “Since the death of Kahn way back in the 1970s I’m not sure we have a figure of comparable standing.” When I read this I was at first taken aback. Kahn is one of the great American architects, up there with Mies, Wright, Richardson, and Jefferson, but in forty years have there really been no successors? On reflection, I think Campbell is right. No one in Kahn’s generation—not Saarinen, Rudolph, or Pei—quite measures up. Certainly not that great dilettante, Philip Johnson.

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A few weeks ago I wrote about Leon Krier’s auditorium at the University of Miami. Yesterday I came across a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, The Nostalgia of the Infinite, painted in 1912-13. I was struck by the similarity to several towers that Krier has designed, the same classical references, the same evocative mood. Indeed, “nostalgia for the infinite” is not a bad capsule characterization of Krier’s architecture, which seems to long for—not so much another time—as another place.

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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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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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