TOPPERS
The Comcast Technology Center (Foster + Partners) in downtown Philadelphia is nearing completion. It’s not open yet, but its impact on the skyline is already apparent. Meh. The most that can be said about it is that it recalls a De Stijl composition of overlapping boxes. But the glass boxes—the building is all glass, of course—lack refinement and look as if a preliminary concept sketch had been rushed into construction. The clumsiest element is the optimistically named “lantern.” There are many interesting skyscraper tops, such as the mooring mast atop the Empire State Building, or the Chrysler Building’s Art Deco spire, but the illuminated Comcast top only looks good at night (like most all-glass buildings). During the day it is a dud, an awkward prism.
The 34-story Alexander tower (Robert A. M. Stern Architects) is much more successful. Although a local architecture critic scoffed at the “wedding cake” design, the nice thing about a wedding cake is that the design supports an interesting top. The Alexander doesn’t make a big deal of its top, but it steps back subtly in an interesting way and is surmounted by a sort of laid-back Mayan temple. Just to the left in the photograph you can see a building from the golden age of skyscraper design,
CRITICS AND CRUSADERS
The Architects Newspaper recently asked a number of critics, academics, and architects “What do you see as the role of the critic in architecture today? Why is it important? What aspects of architecture are not being addressed today by critics?” and “What are the problems with criticism today?” Weighty questions that produced, in most cases, weighty—and lengthy—answers. You can judge for yourself. One of the more insightful comments was that of Frances Anderton, the British host of a weekly Los Angeles design and architecture radio show. “It was easier to be a critic when you were crusading for modernism, or another -ism, from a podium at a highly-regarded publication,” she observed. The pioneers of this mode were Allan Temko at the San Francisco Chronicle (1961-93) and Ada Louise Huxtable at New York Times (1963-82). They were preceded by Lewis Mumford at the New Yorker (1934-1960s), although his relationship to modernism was often equivocal. There had been earlier architecture critics, of course. Montgomery Schuyler wrote for the New York Times (1883-1907) and Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer’s essays appeared in Century Magazine and Garden and Forest,
WRIGHT WAS RIGHT
Ian Bogost’s excellent Atlantic article on the fashionable open plan, which integrates the kitchen into the main living spaces of the house, points out the drawbacks of this arrangement: leaving a messy kitchen open to full view, which can be awkward when entertaining. Bogost correctly credits Frank Lloyd Wright with popularizing the open plan, but he doesn’t point out that in Wright’s Usonian houses, the kitchen—which he called the workspace—is generally positioned out of view of the living room. In this photograph of the Pope-Leighey House, a small Usonian built in 1941 in suburban Virginia, the compact kitchen is unobtrusively tucked in behind the brick wall containing the fireplace. Conveniently opposite the dining area, but out of view. This arrangement is vastly superior to the modern practice of exposing the kitchen as if it were a stage set, which, with all those expensive stainless steel “commercial” appliances prominently on display, I suppose it is.
Incidentally, the Pope-Leighey House now sits on the grounds of Woodlawn Plantation in Alexandria, Virginia and is open to the public.
TOM WOLFE (1930-2018)
The first time I heard Tom Wolfe speak in public was in 1965 or ’66. I was a student at McGill University where he had come to lecture. One line has stuck in my memory; he compared himself to the “renegade cowboy,” the character in Western movies who has lived with the Indians and who comes back to town to tell the tale. I knew Wolfe’s writing from reading him in Esquire, and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby may have been out by then. I remember From Bauhaus to Our House (1981) which came out first as an article in Harper’s (July 1981). By then I was working on minimum cost housing research, somewhat estranged from high architecture, so I had no objection to his mocking tone. I had not yet experienced the epiphany that came from writing Home, but I thought his take on the Modern “revolution” rang true. I still do. Judging from Twitter, From Bauhaus to Our House still rankles architecture critics, as it was intended to do. How could someone not admire the Seagram Building? Almost 40 years later, as Yale University spends half a billion dollars building two Gothic Revival colleges,
PRESERVATION
Why do we renovate, restore, or otherwise preserve old buildings after they have become functionally obsolete? One reason is practical—the building is in good enough shape to be still useful, even in an altered state, or for a different purpose than originally intended. The second reason is cultural. Perhaps the building was once the home of an important figure—Mozart’s house in Vienna, for example, or Washington’s Mount Vernon—or maybe it was the site of an important event such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The third reason is aesthetic: the building is beautiful and incorporates artistry and craftsmanship that have made it the object of our affection. This applies to grand monuments, but also to buildings of lesser ambition; there are entire neighborhoods that represent important human achievements. What seems to me a less compelling reason is the idea that a building should be preserved simply because it is representative of a previous period or architectural fashion. In architecture, as in many human endeavors, not all periods are equally admirable; there are ups and downs. I do wish that masterpieces such as Richardson’s Marshall Fields Wholesale Store, McKim’s Penn Station, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building had not been demolished,
A MAN OF INFLUENCE
“But an influence is not necessarily a good influence” writes Joan Acocella in a review of books about Bob Fosse. She’s right, of course. How often we describe an architect as influential, without qualifying the nature of that influence. Probably the most influential American architect of the late nineteenth century was H. H. Richardson—Richardsonian Romanesque libraries and courthouses grace cities and towns across the country. It’s hard to go wrong with this style. The only modern architect to give his name to a style was Mies van der Rohe, but his legacy is less certain. In the hands of faithful acolytes like SOM, the influence could be benign, but the scores of banal steel-and-glass boxes and miles of appliqué I-beams attest to the limitations of the minimalist Miesian approach. Michael Graves was another architect whose influence was not necessarily “good.” Without his refined color sense and knowledge of history, postmodern practitioners produced parodies—weak jokes without punch lines. Louis Kahn was the most important modernist architect of the late twentieth century, but his influence on American architects was negligible; his “philosophy” was too obscure, and his building forms too distinct to comfortably imitate. Or at least so it seemed to me before I visited India.
