RADICAL CHIC
The architecture group, Superstudio, was founded in Florence in 1966, the year I graduated from architecture school. I remember their projects from the Italian design mag Domus, which I used to leaf through in the library. I didn’t like them then and I don’t like them now. “Although Superstudio built very few actual buildings, its witty photo collages and designs, presented in exhibitions and glossy magazine spreads, opened up new possibilities for what architecture and urban planning could be,” opines a fawning article in the New York Times. The new possibilities included a nihilistic view of architecture masquerading as a fashionable left-wing critique. The Times quotes the last surviving member of the group: “Seeing the dystopias of your own imagination being created is not the best thing you could wish for.” But were they really dystopias? In its muddleheaded way, Superstudio (what pretension!) wanted to have its radical critique and eat it too, which may be why those early collages of implacably gridded buildings marching across the landscape influenced the work of Meier, Koolhaas, Holl, et al. Another possibility that Superstudio opened up was branding; in 1970 they designed a line of furniture for Zanotta.
MINOR FIGURES
Philip Kennicott writes yesterday in the Washington Post about the United States Commission of Fine Arts, whose seven members are currently all Trump appointees, four appointed at the last minute on January 12, 2021. Kennicott is scathing in his evaluation: “The original members, and the vast majority of those who followed them over the past 110 years, were giants in their field, while the Trump appointees who now run the CFA are minor figures, chosen not for their accomplishment but for their ideological conformity to a rigid doctrine of architectural classicism.” Kennicott’s point about ideological conformity is important. When I served on the Commission (2004-12) it included a variety of accomplished architects, landscape architects, and artists—Michael McKinnell, Diana Balmori, David Childs, John Belle, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Teresita Fernández, Philip Freelon, Elyn Zimmerman, and Pamela Nelson. Our chair, Rusty Powell, had the art historian’s—and the Washington insider’s—long view. We had different tastes and different philosophies but the differences were accompanied by a sense of mutual respect. As a result we were able to usefully review projects by widely dissimilar architects and designers: Frank Gehry, Kevin Roche, James Polshek, Richard Rogers, David Schwarz, Norman Foster, Bing Thom, David Adjaye,
FECKLESS FORUM
The New York Times reports on the opening of the Humboldt Forum, a new Museum in Berlin. When I showed the photograph (left) to my wife her reaction was “It looks like a prison.” She wasn’t referring to the Baroque facade, of course. I haven’t seen the museum, but the photograph is like a beauty contest—Baroque vs Modernist—and it’s pretty obvious who is the winner. The Forum sits on the site of the Berliner Schloss, the immense royal palace that had been greatly expanded by Frederick the Great in the early 18th century and whose dome was based on a design by Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The Schloss, which is considered one of the great works of Prussian Baroque architecture, was damaged in the Second World War, and in 1950, the East German government entirely demolished the building (it took 19 tons of dynamite) and replaced it with the Palast der Republik, a modernist building housing the GDR parliament. After German reunification, the Palast was torn down and it was decided to re-build the original 18th-century palace. Although the Times reporter referred to the new building disparagingly as a “facsimile,” there is a long tradition of restoring damaged or destroyed buildings (the medieval St Mark’s Campanile in Venice was rebuilt in 1912 after collapsing).
YES, BUT . . .
“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” famously said F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” In Philip Johnson’s New York Times obituary, Paul Goldberger described him as architecture’s “godfather, gadfly, scholar, patron, critic, curator, and cheerleader.”That is true. It is also true that although Johnson rejected Nazism after the end of the Second World War, in his younger years he attended Nazi rallies in Germany, admired Mein Kampf, and had connections to the Nazi party. Can Johnson be celebrated for the first activities and condemned for the second? Apparently not. A public Instagram letter from the largely anonymous Johnson Study Group. demands that with the purpose of “dismantling of white supremacy” MoMA and the GSD remove Johnson’s name from titles and spaces, which include the title of the museum’s chief curator of architecture and design, the department that Johnson founded, as well as the house (now owned by Harvard) that Johnson built in Cambridge. In other words, Mr. Johnson is to be cancelled.
TRUMPITECTURE
Alex Beam’s article in yesterday’s Boston Globe has a provocative title (for a liberal paper): “Trump may be right about one thing, architecture.” The author seconds Trump’s critique of Brutalism and quotes me that too often we get “courthouses that look like corporate office buildings and atrium-equipped government buildings that resemble casinos or upscale resort hotels.” Beam refers to traditional or so-called Classical buildings as “Trumpitecture.” Catchy, but misleading. Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s mansion in Pal Beach, is a Moorish-Spanish confection designed by Marion Syms Wyeth and Joseph Urban in 1934-37, and his apartment in New York’s Trump Tower is decorated in an ersatz Louis XV style, but as Beam himself writes, Chicago’s Trump Tower (designed by SOM) is a mainstream modern skyscraper, as are the Trump Tower in New York, and the Trump hotels in Vancouver, Honolulu, and Las Vegas, and the recently renamed Trump properties in Toronto and Panama. On the other hand, one of the first recent federal courthouses in a Greek Revival style (designed by HBRA) was built in Tuscaloosa in 2006. That was a full decade before Trump became President.
PARISIAN PUZZLE
Every time I leave the Larkin Building in downtown Philadelphia, where we live, I admire the office building across the street. It’s a French Renaissance pile, three stories on top of a half basement, with an obviously more recent top floor addition. The original building, very handsome, is brick with limestone and marble trim. The raised entrance is surmounted by a wrought iron papal balcony. I’ve looked inside and there is a glass-roofed atrium in the middle. I’m impressed, but also puzzled. The building looks at least a hundred years old, and when it was built this was an industrial neighborhood with a scattering of modest Philadelphia row-houses. The Larkin Building is an 11-story loft, built as a warehouse in 1912 by the same company that commissioned Wright to build its headquarters in Buffalo. So what was this rather elegant French Renaissance hôtel doing here? Was it built by some eccentric Parisian immigrant, an emigré count perhaps, or a remittance man? According the Hidden City, a website devoted to historic Philadelphia buildings, 2133 Arch Street was built in 1908 by the City to serve as a Juvenile Court and House of Detention. It was a jail!
