A GOOD CAUSE
Home: A Celebration, just published by Rizzoli, is a beautiful book in a good cause; it’s a fundraiser for No Kid Hungry. The interior decorator Charlotte Moss has brought together essays, poems, sketches, and photographs by a variety of authors, including Joyce Carol Oates, Isaac Mizrahi, Annie Leibovitz, Julian Fellowes, Bette Midler, John Grisham, and Alice Waters. There are a few architects, too: Marc Appleton, Michael Imber, Tom Kligerman. And yours truly.
MISPRINT
A breathless article in the New York Times writes: “Mr. Hernández and his family are moving to a new home on the outskirts of Nacajuca, Mexico: a sleek, 500-square-foot building with two bedrooms, a finished kitchen and bath, and indoor plumbing. What’s most unusual about the home is that it was made with an 11-foot-tall three-dimensional printer.” Housing crisis? No problem, high tech comes to the rescue! The report is rather sparse on details, but as far as I can make out, the 3D printer spits out the walls and partitions using “Lavacrete,” a concrete-like material. That’s it; the foundations, concrete slab, roof, doors, windows, the “finished kitchen and bath, and indoor plumbing,” and so on, are produced conventionally, so it’s hard to see where the vaunted savings come in. Even if the walls are cheaper—which is far from clear—that would make a minuscule dent in the overall price of the house. In a North American production home, total construction cost accounts for only about one quarter of the selling price, depending on land cost. One quarter.
COMFORT
“And really, isn’t that what design is meant to do? Challenge us, provoke us, unsettle our expectations. Comfort is welcome. But discomfort can be, too,” concludes a recent editorial in the New York Times’ T Magazine. Oh, really? That’s what design is meant to do? A certain kind of architect and designer—or in this case, magazine editor—considers comfort to be the equivalent of complacency. Or is this just a rationalization, a way to justify exposing concrete, painting surfaces black, leaving out upholstery? No one should confuse comfort with good design; comfort is not sufficient, but it is required. And it is difficult. Much easier to “challenge, provoke, and unsettle,” and pretend that “discomfort is welcome.” What rubbish.
Photo: Zig-Zag Chair, Gerrit Rietveld, 1930s
INSTRUCTION AND INSPIRATION
A reader recently wrote to me citing Frank Lloyd Wright as a model for the future. “Wright’s discipline itself offers us an antidote to the wandering efforts of rudderless students: it can be understood and undertaken by those with a little personal aptitude and a readiness for hard work to design buildings of real point, character, freshness, and charm.” How likely is a Wright Revival? Historical examples of revivals abound: Inigo Jones revived Palladio, Wren revived Bramante, Lutyens revived Wren. More recently, Richard Meier launched his career by reviving early Corbusier, Tadao Ando learned a lot from Kahn, and Thomas Phifer has revisited Mies. What is striking about the revivalists cited above is that they are all architects of the first rank who found inspiration in the work of an earlier master. Inspiration, not instruction. The reason that a Wright Revival is unlikely is that his work and writings are didactic—my way is the right way, the only way—which tends to produce disciples and followers, but does not necessarily inspire independent creative talents. The successful model for a revival is capacious, opening doors rather than setting limits, acting as a springboard rather than a template.
Photo: Smith House (Richard Meier),
MOXIE
It is eight weeks since Shirley died. I still can’t get used to saying “I” and “mine” rather than “we” and “our.”
I look at old photographs a lot. This is one when she was a student in a convent school with the sisters of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame in Montreal. She is ten and all her best qualities are already in evidence in her forthright gaze: good humor, realism, intelligence, fortitude. And moxie—she is fearless.
FUNERAL BLUES
A friend sent me these lines from Auden’s “Funeral Blues”:
. . . my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
Yes.
