Architecture

The controversy over the future Eisenhower Memorial has involved many actors: congressmen and congressional subcommittees, the Eisenhower family, the National Civic Arts Society, the National Capital Planning Commission, and assorted political pundits. A small but influential body central to the process has received less public attention. The U. S. Commission of Fine Arts was the brainchild of Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham, who with Charles F. McKim, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. was the author of the so-called McMillan Plan, which restored the monumental core of Washington, D.C. to L’Enfant’s vision.  Burnham saw the need for an official body to oversee the implementation of the artistic aspects of the plan,

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In 1997, my friend Martin Pawley wrote a column for The Architect’s Journal titled “The Strange Death of Architectural Criticism.” The leading architectural critic of his generation, Martin died in 2008, but I wonder what he would have to say about the latest demise of his craft? The New York Times has a “chief architecture critic” who hardly ever writes about architecture. Paul Goldberger, our leading critic, has not appeared in the New Yorker since September 2011. I always check to see what Sarah Williams Goldhagen, the interesting critic of The New Republic,

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Jon Gertner writes an interesting article in the February 25 New York Times on technological innovation. It is illustrated by a 1966 photograph of researchers standing outside their offices in the Bell Lab building in Murray Hill, N.J. An endless, featureless, rather wide corridor with a strip of fluorescent lighting straight down the center of an acoustic tile ceiling. A model of dreary, unimaginative, bureaucratic design, right? Wrong. As Gertner writes, the building was conceived by Mervin Kelly (who later became Bell Labs’ chairman of the board) in 1941, and the long corridor,

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I finally had a chance to see the modifications that Diller Scofidio + Renfro have made to Lincoln Center. These changes were much ballyhooed by the New York press, but they strike me as self-conscious one-liners, calculated to draw attention to themselves. Like a Hollywood star who dresses for the Oscars in a tuxedo and colorful sneakers. The, perhaps unintended, and surprising consequence at Lincoln Center is that the 1960s buildings actually look like coherent works of architecture by comparison with what come across as art installations.

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