Architects

YES, BUT . . .

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” famously said F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” In Philip Johnson’s New York Times obituary, Paul Goldberger described him as architecture’s “godfather, gadfly, scholar, patron, critic, curator, and cheerleader.”That is true. It is also true that although Johnson rejected Nazism after the end of the Second World War, in his younger years he attended Nazi rallies in Germany, admired Mein Kampf, and had connections to the Nazi party.

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PARISIAN PUZZLE

Every time I leave the Larkin Building in downtown Philadelphia, where we live, I admire the office building across the street. It’s a French Renaissance pile, three stories on top of a half basement, with an obviously more recent top floor addition. The original building, very handsome, is brick with limestone and marble trim. The raised entrance is surmounted by a wrought iron papal balcony. I’ve looked inside and there is a glass-roofed atrium in the middle. I’m impressed, but also puzzled. The building looks at least a hundred years old, and when it was built this was an industrial neighborhood with a scattering of modest Philadelphia row-houses.

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CRIPES, NICK

I just learned that Nick Wilkinson (1942-2017) died. Sad news. We had lost touch in recent years but we saw a lot of each other in the 1980s. Nick founded and edited Open House International, a journal devoted to housing. He published a number of my papers as well as an issue devoted to “Seventeen Years of Minumum Cost Housing” and I was a member of the editorial board. Thanks to the British Council, Nick visited me in Montreal and lectured at McGill, and I visited him in Newcastle and lectured at the university, where he was then teaching.

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THE TALENTED MR. CRET

Perhaps the most televised twentieth-century work of American architecture is the Federal Reserve headquarters (Eccles Building) in Washington, D.C., designed by Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945) in 1938. Cret’s stripped classical facade inevitably accompanies any report on the Fed on the nightly news. Now Cret has a twofer: Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, where President Trump was taken for treatment of Covid-19.  Walter Reed was designed by Cret in 1939-42. It is said that President Roosevelt suggested the twenty-story tower to Cret after visiting Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue’s Nebraska State Capitol. Walter Reed is an example of Cret’s late style,

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MOVING THE BOX

Blair Kamin, the architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, recently tweeted a May 19  photograph of Mies van der Rohe’s famous Farnsworth House almost inundated by the rising waters of the nearby Fox River. Kamin writes that the water level appears to be receding, so it seems likely that the house may be spared, at least this year. Although its floor is raised five feet in the air, because Mies sited the house on low ground only 75 feet from a river that regularly overflows its banks in the spring, the house has been flooded several times,

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GLASS FOLLY

Alex Beam’s interesting new book on the saga of the Farnsworth House, which I reviewed in the Wall Street Journal recently, raises an interesting question. How can a house that has so many functional drawbacks, that is basically dysfunctional, be considered a modernist masterpiece? The answer reveals more about modernism than it does about masterpieces. Modernist buildings are often described as clean and functional. Beam’s book makes clear that the glass house in Plano was neither. The glazed wall got sooty from the heating system, and was covered with condensation during cold weather. Dr. Farnsworth spent the first part of her summer weekends hosing down the exterior.

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THE FIRST MODERNISTS

This 1931 photograph of a group of party-goers at the Beaux-Arts Ball in New York is famous. That’s William Van Alen in the center (the Chrysler Building), flanked by Ely Jacques Kahn (the Squibb Building) on the left, and Ralph Walker (the Irving Trust Building) on the right. Three great skyscraper architects. William F. Lamb (the Empire State Building) was also there but didn’t make it into the picture. These men are all part of a generation of American architects that has been written out of the history books. That’s a shame. We all know their buildings—the Empire State, the Chrysler,

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POP GOES THE WEASEL

News that the Abrams House in Pittsburgh, designed by Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown in 1979, has been sold and is to be demolished. Apparently, the new owner, who lives in the adjacent Giovannitti House (designed by Richard Meier) wants to enlarge his garden—the original owner of the Giovannitti House had sold the back part of his lot to the Abrams. Or maybe he just wanted to get rid of an eyesore? Venturi’s postmodern antics do not age particularly well. I was struck by the presence of a large (looks to be about 8 feet by 12 feet) painting by Roy Lichtenstein in the Abrams living room.

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