Architecture

I read Catesby Leigh’s interesting article, “Uncle Sam’s Buildings,” in The American Conservative. He argues in favor of the federal buildings that were built in the prewar era, and which more or less followed the classical style, and is critical of the modernist era, perhaps best characterized by the awful FBI headquarters building in DC. His essay brought up a question for me. The examples of classical federal buildings that he admires are all from a particular era, and his essay implies that this architectural style should continue ad infinitum. Whatever the merits of this suggestion,

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A happy four days spent on Mount Desert Island. Gave a lecture on Planting Fields to the Beatrix Farrand Society; visited the spectacular Abby Rockefeller Garden; had a memorable lunch at Martha Stewart’s great house, Skylands; saw a beautiful wooden body 1913 Peugeot in the Seal Cove Auto Museum; went sailing on a Herreshoff canoe yawl; ate Scott Koniecko’s perfect oysters in his as-yet unfinished perfect house. I stayed in Northeast Harbor, once known as Philadelphia on the Rocks because so many Philadelphians summered there, and because they were a tipsy crowd. Cheers!

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“It is very necessary, in the outset of all inquiry, to distinguish carefully between Architecture and Building,” wrote John Ruskin in the opening chapter of The Seven Lamps of Architecture. The modern democratic spirit tends to resist this distinction. Surely all buildings can be architecture, the humble as well as the grand, the cottage as well as the cathedral? The problem with this well-meaning leveling out is not that it elevates the former but that it tends to lower the latter. When a utilitarian apartment block or office building is treated as architecture, that establishes a sort of benchmark in which repetition,

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I got an email request the other day. The sender had asked ChatGPT “What are the best articles about architecture written since 1990?” and the third recommendation, after two essays by Koolhaas, was “The End of Architecture?” by Witold Rybczynski. According to the bot, “In this provocative article published in 1996, Rybczynski reflects on the state of architecture at the end of the 20th century and questions whether the discipline has reached its limits or if new directions are emerging.” Stirring stuff. Could I send a link to the article, my correspondent asked? He had been unable to find it online,

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I’ve been writing about Planting Fields, a Roaring Twenties estate on Long Island’s North Shore, Great Gatsby territory. The house, an impressive Tudor pile, was designed by Walker & Gillette in 1918-22; the garden was laid out by Olmsted Brothers. Like the more than five hundred country retreats that were built on the so-called Gold Coast during that era, it was inspired by the British country house, think Brideshead or Downton Abbey. But while the American versions of manors, chateaux, and villas, are beautiful architecturally, they are hollow representations of an unattainable ideal. These country family seats lasted less than one generation before their sprawling grounds were subdivided and sold off,

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I was recently listening to an online interview with Bret Stephens. Speaking admiringly of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke, the New York Times columnist referred to Burke’s approach as “the wisdom of experience rather than the wisdom of theory.” While this pithy observation describes liberal politics, it struck me that it could equally be applied to architecture. At its best, this is an art of the possible, that is, what has worked rather than what should work. That is why architects in the past generally studied a widely accepted canon—the accumulated wisdom of experience.

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