CRIPES, NICK
I just learned that Nick Wilkinson (1942-2017) died. Sad news. We had lost touch in recent years but we saw a lot of each other in the 1980s. Nick founded and edited Open House International, a journal devoted to housing. He published a number of my papers as well as an issue devoted to “Seventeen Years of Minumum Cost Housing” and I was a member of the editorial board. Thanks to the British Council, Nick visited me in Montreal and lectured at McGill, and I visited him in Newcastle and lectured at the university, where he was then teaching. I stayed at his home. It was winter and the house was pretty cold. I still remember the medieval sight of Nick and his children huddling around the stove, toasting bread.
ROUGHLY CLASSIC
Earlier this week I watched a live video webcast of a roundtable concerning the debate over the future of federal architecture, that is, on whether federal buildings such as courthouses should have a mandated classical style. There was immediate confusion because two of the participants–Notre Dame University professors–stated that classicism wasn’t a style at all. Then what was it? There was talk about local materials, green buildings, and load-bearing construction, which wasn’t much help. But if classicism wasn’t a style what exactly would a federal mandate entail? The confusion was compounded further by the interchangeable use of “classical” and “traditional.” Classical refers to the Graeco-Roman tradition; traditional is popularly used to refer to any pre-modern architectural style such as Gothic, Spanish Colonial, or California Mission. But what about a government building such as Bertram Goodhue’s splendid Nebraska State Capitol, which opened in 1932? Wiki describers it as having “elements of Achaemenid, Assyrian, Byzantine, Gothic, and Romanesque architecture.” Goodhue himself wrote: “So, while the architectural style employed may, roughly, be called ‘Classic,’ it makes no pretense of belonging to any period of the past.” A free spirit like Goodhue would have caviled at the idea of a mandated style.
PHILLY PANTO
Do we still celebrate Columbus Day? This summer, statues of the intrepid explorer were defaced, beheaded, and toppled. In South Philadelphia, the City shrouded a Columbus statue and recently announced its removal. It is unclear what will happen to the Columbus Memorial near the Delaware River. The 106-foot ersatz obelisk was designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in 1992. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “The Delaware River Waterfront Corp., which maintains the monument but was not responsible for its construction, said in a statement Tuesday that the statue ‘does not align with DRWC’s mission to create and maintain a safe and welcome space for all.’” In order to “protect public safety” and “reduce continued pain” the now offensive text at the base of the obelisk, which identifies Columbus as “Charismatic Leader, Navigator, Mathematician, Cartographer” has been covered over with plywood. Safe spaces. The Orwellian pantomime continues.
THE TALENTED MR. CRET
Perhaps the most televised twentieth-century work of American architecture is the Federal Reserve headquarters (Eccles Building) in Washington, D.C., designed by Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945) in 1938. Cret’s stripped classical facade inevitably accompanies any report on the Fed on the nightly news. Now Cret has a twofer: Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, where President Trump was taken for treatment of Covid-19. Walter Reed was designed by Cret in 1939-42. It is said that President Roosevelt suggested the twenty-story tower to Cret after visiting Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue’s Nebraska State Capitol. Walter Reed is an example of Cret’s late style, a blend of stripped Classicism and Art Deco. Cret never designed a skyscraper, but this gives a good idea of the direction he might have taken.
INFLUENCE
The cancel culture never sleeps. The discovery that Edward Hopper once copied paintings “challenges the notion that Hopper was an absolute original, uninfluenced by others” according to the breathless headline in the New York Times. A rather silly conclusion since Hopper was sixteen at the time, and was obviously using the paintings of others as an exercise, to hone his—yet unformed—skills. And since neither the technique nor the themes of these pedestrian paintings prefigure his later work, it is a real stretch to speak of “influence.” When I was sixteen I remember clumsily copying Picasso’s “Mirror Woman”; the masonite panel hung in my parents’ basement rec room for years. I was rather proud of it.
THE USUAL SUSPECTS
The City of Philadelphia has announced a $2.2 billion development on the Penn’s Landing site beside the Delaware River. The twelve towers include apartments, offices, and a hotel, the architects are Pelli Clarke Pelli and Bjarke Ingels Group. PCP has already designed high-rise buildings in the city; BIG is a newcomer. Both continue the recent pattern of importing outsiders such as Vinoly, Foster, Gehry, Snøhetta, Williams & Tsien, Pei Cobb Freed, Ennead—the usual suspects. Philadelphia, like most big cities, once had its own stable of eminent practitioners—Strickland, Walter, Furness, Cope & Stewardson, Eyre, Trumbauer, Cret, Howe—and their buildings gave the city its own particular character. That is gone. Now what we get are generic solutions that could be anywhere. The proposed Penn’s Landing buildings will be all-glass, of course.
