Architecture

Ask the People

Speaking recently at a British conference on urbanism, Daniel Libeskind called for a greater degree of public participation in the design process. “The people have to be empowered to be involved in shaping the program, not just the program but also the actual space,” he said. Let the voice of the people be heard! I was reminded of this tired nostrum as I was watching Seven Days in May. In a taped commentary, director John Frankenheimer several times emphasized that this excellent movie, shot in 1963, could not be made today (he died in 2004).

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The New-New Thing

The front page of today’s New York Times Arts section features two articles that sum up the state of architecture today. The newspaper’s music critic Anthony Tommasini reviews an inaugural performance in new concert hall in Sonoma State University, and Robin Pogrebin reports on Frank Gehry’s appointment to design an arts campus in Miami. The architect of the hall at Sonoma State is William Rawn, whose Seiji Ozawa Hall in Tanglewood has been acoustically rated as the fourth-best concert hall in the nation. Tommasini calls Weill Hall “a beautiful space” and the sound of the hall “rich,

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Foxes and Hedgehogs

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote a famous essay based on a saying attributed to the ancient Greek poet, Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin was referring to writers and thinkers—he characterized Plato, Nietzsche, and Proust as hedgehogs, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Pushkin as foxes. I was visiting Seattle this week, and two buildings almost side by side, the Seattle Public Library (2004) and the City Hall (2005), reminded me that the metaphor holds true for architects as well. Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus, the architects of the library, are definitely hedgehogs; they have one big idea that they flog for all it’s worth.

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Ask the Pigs

“If we want to understand the physical environment we should not ask architects about it,” writes Jonathan Meade in his new book, Museum Without Walls, (excerpted here). “After all, if we want to understand charcuterie we don’t seek the opinion of pigs.” Meades’s point is that the environment is much too valuable—and much too complex—to be entrusted to a single profession. Designing buildings is a perfectly respectable occupation, but architects want more, they want to create places. But places are created by their occupants over time, not by designers on paper, and most architectural attempts at place-making,

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By the Numbers

I recently heard a talk by David Gottfried, the founder of the U.S. Green Building Council, which pioneered the LEED system for rating the greenness of buildings. Gottfried is no longer associated with USGBC and was promoting his latest project, a book titled Greening My Life which, as near as I could figure, was a rating system to score your personal happiness. There is something about numerical rating systems that appeals to Americans. We have GREs, SATs, LSATs, GMATs, Best College Rankings, teacher evaluations, Best Place to Live, opinion surveys, and political polls. This abiding belief in the power of numbers may have to do with living in a large heterogeneous country whose population no longer shares a common set of values.

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The Master Builders

I attended a meeting of the Design Futures Council ambitiously billed as a “Leadership Summit on Sustainability.” Present were engineers and representatives of the building materials industry (whose parent organizations were the chief sponsors of the event), but most of the participants were architects. The last group voiced a recurring theme. “It is important to think not only about buildings but about neighborhoods, and not only neighborhoods but cities, or preferably regions. Better still, the entire planet.” During the meeting, one architect voiced the opinion that architects could design anything. Oh, really? Architects are trained to design buildings.

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State Caps

American state capitol buildings are traditionally a smaller version of the U.S. Capitol, complete with central dome; you can find them in Montpelier, Harrisburg, Little Rock, and Salt Lake City. The state capitol in Lincoln, Nebraska is different. There is a small gold dome, but it’s on top of a fifteen-storey office tower. The architect was Bertrand Grosvenor Goodhue. He won a 1920 national competition against formidable competition; second and third places were was taken by John Russell Pope and McKim, Mead & White, who both designed classical schemes with the familiar domes.

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Getyourshittogether

And now for something completely different.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has turned its sights on a new global problem: sanitation. The foundation has committed $3 million to support research that has as its goal to “reinvent the toilet as a stand-alone unit without piped-in water, a sewer connection, or outside electricity—all for less than 5 cents a day.” “Reinvent the toilet” outré, but it isn’t. Children playing around a sparkling water pump are more photogenic than a well-functioning toilet, but inadequately treated human waste is the source of most water-transmitted diseases. And since running water supply is in short supply in third world countries,

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