Architecture

I have spent many hours of my life teaching in college classrooms. Why are these rooms always so dismal? The worst don’t even have windows. And even when they are spanking new, they inevitably lack a crucial ingredient–architectural character. It is as if their architects, or perhaps it’s the college administrators, had decided that the ideal teaching space had to be neutral, bland, plain vanilla. In fact, the opposite is true. Classrooms should stimulate, not narcotize. I had these thoughts recently as I lectured at the University of Miami school of architecture, whose auditorium is in a building designed several years ago by Leon Krier.

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“Those who can, do,” observed George Bernard Shaw. “Those who can’t, teach.” As someone who has spent a lifetime teaching I’ve never warmed to that observation. I was reminded of it the other day when I overheard a remark from an architect colleague, who also happens to be a teacher. “The A-students end up teaching,” he said. “The B-students end up working for the C-students.” Other than the fact that grade inflation has virtually eliminated C-students, his observation accords with my own experience. Two of the three top students in my graduating class ended up as teachers; some of the weakest students,

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My hotel room is on the eleventh floor, looking out over a landscape of downtown rooftops. I am struck by the difference between old and new buildings. The older buildings are crowned by an assortment of pitched roofs, spires, towers, and cupolas. The newer buildings are ingloriously surmounted by—mechanical equipment. In a few cases, the architects have attempted to camouflage the hardware, but these clumsy screens are not much of an improvement. Seen from above, the elevator penthouses, vent stacks, air-conditioning chillers, antennas, and satellite dishes lend the architecture a pathetic air, as if the buildings are so unimportant that anything at all can be dumped on their roofs.

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I drove by an old school today in northeast Philadelphia. I recognized immediately that it was a school, even before I read the name inscribed over the entrance: Woodrow Wilson Public School. What an entrance! The four Composite columns of the portico rose fully two stories high, supporting a balcony which I assume was off the principal’s office—or should have been. The wings on both sides stretched out in a regular beat of brick pilasters and tall classroom windows. The school opened in 1928 (Wilson died in 1924). What struck me about the building was not its Classical style and solid construction—that was simply how one built public buildings in those days—but rather the evident status of public education that the architecture conveyed.

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I was in Athens, Georgia to deliver a lecture at the university when I came across The News Building, a work by  Allan Greenberg that I had previously seen only in photographs. Modern classicism is most commonly found in private residences, sometimes on campuses, but rarely in commercial buildings such as this one: a newspaper plant and offices. A large portico with exceptionally fat, unfluted Doric columns, marks the main entrance and leads to a two-storey lobby that is a remarkable exercise in polychromy; the colors are almost shocking. The precast concrete and brick building is 18 years-old.

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The opening of the expanded Arena Stage theater in Washington, D.C. raises an interesting issue. Philip Johnson once called museums the modern age’s cathedrals, and museum’s are sometimes thought of as the architect’s commission of choice. But a museum is basically a series of display rooms whose architecture is—or should be—subservient to its contents. The reason that places of worship were traditionally the acme of the architect’s art, is that they are (very large) public rooms whose design is usually required to celebrate and elevate their religious function. Theaters, like concert halls and opera houses, are more challenging than museums.

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Last week I was in Ottawa for a family funeral, staying in a hotel down the street from the U.S. embassy. The embassy, which succeeds a beautiful building designed by Cass Gilbert in the 1930s, was designed in 1999 by SOM in its post-modernist mode; limestone and stainless steel, neither modern nor really traditional. What struck me was the security barrier that was being built around the building—it looked strong enough to stop a Sherman tank. But this is Ottawa’s ByWard Market, not the Green Zone! Embassies are supposed to stand for national values; this one looks both forbidding and craven.

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