From The Inbox

Two readers objecting to my conclusion in my post on Architecture, Utility, and Aesthetics wrote to express their objections. One eMail read, in part:

Are you saying that a building built for beauty first can still be called good architecture, no matter how uncomfortable and ill-adapted it is for its tenants, even if it's almost unusable?

And one — written by the person whose name was charitably withheld in this previous post — read simply (and I quote the eMail in its entirety):

My advice is that you might want to stick to music.

Both these readers seem to imagine that architectural beauty is something applied from the outside, disconnected and separate from, and undetermined by, a building's program (the specifications for a building's intended use and purpose, it's mechanical systems, the manifold accommodations required for those using the building, etc., etc.). Architectural beauty is, of course, nothing of the sort. Architectural beauty grows from, and is intimately bound up with and determined by, a building's program. That's the singular hallmark of all great architecture from Imhotep's time to the present. Louis Sullivan may have codified in trenchant epigram the concept that "Form follows function," but great architecture has, without exception, obeyed that dictum from Day One. And it's by a building's aesthetically imaginative realization of that dictum, and by that aesthetically imaginative realization alone, that a building's architectural beauty is determined, and its architectural worth judged.

Seeing to it that roofs don't leak, that ceilings are high enough so that one doesn't bump one's head against them, that building maintenance is within reasonable bounds, etc., are engineering considerations of the most quotidian and taken-for-granted sort, the successful carrying out of which is part of an architect's fundamental professional obligations; ones that are dealt with as matters of course, and not worth special remark. Failures in that realm are failures of professional responsibility, not architectural failures, and are inadmissible as criteria for the judging of a building's architectural worth.

The revolutionary Pyrex glass roof of Frank Lloyd Wright's Johnson Wax Administration Building was (is) a brilliant engineering, and aesthetically breathtaking architectural, solution to the problem of bringing light into the building's vast interior spaces. That the roof leaked because the engineering technology of the time was incapable of dealing with it adequately may be viewed by sensible-shoes bourgeois as a failure by Wright of his fundamental professional responsibility, and a mark against the architectural worth of the building. Or it may be viewed, as it was by the building's owner who paid for and commissioned Wright to design the building, as part of the price one must at times pay for the privilege of owning and working and/or living in a building of surpassing architectural beauty and worth.