Sounds & Fury

A Curiously Appealing Concept

This strikes us as a curiously appealing concept:

[B]eneath Kings Place, 150 strides from Eurostar St Pancras, rumbles a cultural revolution. Peter Millican, the out-of-town developer who bought the land in 1999, has created an office block that will also present classical music concerts and art exhibitions, completely free of public subsidy.

[...]

This is the plan. Half of Kings Place is let to the Guardian newspaper, the rest to Network Rail and other tenants who pay a commercial rent. Restaurants, bars and other amenities will be open to the public from breakfast to midnight, just like any other gherkin on the map.

The difference, however, hits the eye as you enter the lobby. On the right of security is an open sculpture gallery with a fully-curated programme and a working artist, Abigail Fallis, in residence. Down one escalator flight is a visual art gallery.

Another flight down are the concert halls, one space with 420 seats, the other 220.

[...]

Along with the art galleries, the music programme is filling up with famous acts. The opening in October will present 100 concerts in five days featuring Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen’s Musick; the Brodsky, Duke and Chilingarian quartets; the Classical Opera Company and the pianist Jean-Bernard Pommier.

Two groups, the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, are moving onto the site. Both are officially resident at the subsidised South Bank but it’s the private developer of Kings Place who is giving them waterside offices at peppercorn rent, as well as a free hand with programming content.

RTWT here.

Sad News

Sad news, and a loss of a meaningful critical voice. Architecture critic Herbert Muschamp is dead of lung cancer at age 59.

As the architecture critic for The [New York] Times from 1992 to 2004, Mr. Muschamp seized on a moment when the repetitive battles between Modernists and Post-Modernists had given way to a surge of exuberance that put architecture back in the public spotlight. His openness to new talent was reflected in the architects he championed, from Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel, now major figures on the world stage, to younger architects like Greg Lynn, Lindy Roy and Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto.

He also paid close attention to architects who were recognized for their theoretical writings. Mr. Muschamp seemed as interested in the ideas that pushed architecture forward as he was in the successes and failures of buildings themselves.

His criticism stood out for the way he wove together seemingly unrelated themes in an arch, self-deprecating tone, a signature style that helped break down the image of the critic as an all-knowing figure who wrote from atop a pedestal.

His voice will be missed.

Full New York Times obituary can be read here.

Explains Just About Everything

Regular readers of this blog over the years are more than passingly aware of our numerous, um, criticisms of the quality of the arts coverage of the mainstream media, particularly the daily mainstream media, in terms of its content, its writers, and the makeup of its pages, our most frequent target being the arts pages of The New York Times. We most frequently target The Times because it's our "native" newspaper, so to speak (although not a native New Yorker, we've been reading the arts pages of The Times since our junior high school days); a newspaper that's often, and for good reason, referred to as America's "National Newspaper of Record"; and because of the precipitous descent in the quality and content of those pages over the past couple years or so in particular.

Well, the man most responsible for that descent — New York Times culture editor, Sam Sifton, who was appointed culture editor of The Times in 2005 — is holding court and fielding reader questions this week in The Times's Talk to the Newsroom section of the newspaper, and so we thought we might ask a question or ten of Mr. Sifton. But all we could think of to ask was the simple question:

What specially qualifies you to "overse[e] the daily Arts pages ... and [the] Arts & Leisure [section]" of any major broadsheet, much less The New York Times, our "National Newspaper of Record"?

Needless to say, and as expected, our question wasn't published, and no answer was otherwise forthcoming.

We don't blame Mr. Sifton for that, actually, as the question was both unseemly and exceedingly rudely put, and aggressive in the extreme into the bargain. And so we went a-Googling for an answer. And what did we find? This, from the 2005 Times press release announcing Mr. Sifton's appointment as the culture editor of The Times:

Mr. Sifton, 38, has been deputy culture editor at The Times since 2004. He joined The Times in 2001 as deputy Dining editor, and became Dining editor later that year. Previously he was a founding editor of Talk magazine where he worked until 1998. Before joining Talk he held a number of positions at the New York Press from 1990 to 1998, including managing editor, media critic, senior editor, contributing editor and restaurant critic. Before joining the New York Press he taught social studies in New York City public schools from 1990 to 1994. Before that, he was an assistant editor at American Heritage from 1988 to 1990.

Mr. Sifton graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with a B.A. degree in history and literature in 1988. He is author of A Field Guide to the Yettie (Talk Miramax Books, 2000).

Pretty much explains just about everything, doesn't it.

Astonishing And Breathtaking

Imagine a commuter in any city in the United States with a subway system descending on his morning ride to the office and his office cubicle into a subway station whose entranceway looks like this:

and whose walls look like this:

and this:

and this:

and this:

And there's more, much more, here.

Astonishing, breathtaking, and breathtakingly beautiful.

(Thanks to A Fool In The Forest for the link.)

Just For The Record

An intellectual blogger with a perverse taste and seemingly insatiable appetite for the low in culture whom I refuse to name and whose blog I've just removed from our Culture Blogs listing and refuse to here link, yesterday posted the following:

I just wrote a note to the National Trust for Historical Preservation. Somebody's gotta take the hard-reactionary stance, darn it.

Dear All --

I'd been under the impression that the preservation movement came about in large part as a protest against what modernism has done to our environment. An anti-modernist stance is certainly why I at least am interested in supporting the preservation movement.

So imagine my dismay in recent years as the National Trust has taken it more and more on themselves to speak up for and agitate for preservation of modernist buildings. I notice in your Jan/Feb issue two major articles cryin' the blues about supposed modernist masterpieces, for example. (One of them is here.)

I'm very sorry to see that you've fallen for the architecture world's argument that modernism now deserves to be seen not as a disastrous episode in architecture history, but as a worthy-of-preservation moment.

The argument the architecture establishment is making is yet another in a series of their endless attempts to legitimize and perpetuate modernism. "It wasn't so bad ... It was well-intended ... After all, some of the buildings were great ... It deserves love and care too ... Why not embrace it?"

No no no. The current architecture establishment is the direct descendant of the original modernists, and they're doing what they can to entice preservationists into supporting their awful line of descent. They're doing what they can to co-opt their enemies.

Don't fall for it. Insist on the facts: Modernism stank, and was a destructive and totalitarian disaster.

We should be fighting these attempts to redeem modernism, not falling for them. Let's be clear: Modernism was a terrible disaster, the worst thing to happen in all of architectural history. The scale of its damage to our shared environment is on a par with what happens when wars devastate cities and countrysides.

Well, I guess you already have fallen for the let's-preserve-modernism line, darn it.

Would you mind directing me to a truly anti-modernist, pro-preservation-of-traditional-architecture organization?

Best,

[name withheld]

I wonder if they'll print it. Any bets?

I replied thusly to the above in the comments section of the post in question:

If you can find anyone to take the "Will" side, I'll take the other side, and give 1000-1 odds into the bargain.

Why should they print your letter? It's thoroughly uninformed, and reads like something written by a zealot from the lunatic fringe with an ax to grind. It's one thing to skewer Modernist architecture for its real failures and absurd moral cast. It's quite another to blanket-condemn the architecture of an entire architectural movement that was one of the most inventive and, at its best, one of the most aesthetically satisfying in all architectural history.

ACD

My above comment was summarily deleted by the post's author almost as soon as it was posted, and I reprint it here just for the record.

What It's All About

I've adduced on this blog more times than I care to count, and in the strongest possible terms, the ought-to-be-self-evident-but-strangely-isn't keystone idea that,

...genuine architecture is art first, and building second. No art, no architecture, which is to say that any building in whose design aesthetic considerations were not treated as primary is an example of mere building, and not architecture. And so for critical purposes a distinction must be made between mere building and architecture. "Bumping your head...the rising damp...whether you're going to have to put out buckets in the middle of the living room to catch the leaking rainwater" are all valid primary critical criteria in judging the worth of a mere building. They are in no way valid primary critical criteria in judging the worth of a work of architecture. As I've hammered home ad nauseam here and elsewhere, concern with aesthetics — art — is always and forever architecture's primary defining characteristic. It's that alone which separates architecture from mere building, and is alone architecture's — and the architect's — sine qua non, and very raison d'être..

[The above taken from this September 2004 post]

In a marvelous interview with the great architect Frank Gehry for The Wall Street Journal by novelist Akhil Sharma, there's this:

"I don't know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do," Mr. Gehry says. "Architects have to become parental. They have to learn to be parental." By this he means that an architect has to listen to his client but also remain firm about what the architect knows best, the aesthetics of a building. This, Mr. Gehry says, is what makes an architect relevant in the process that leads to a completed building. "I think a lot of my colleagues lose it, lose that relevance in the spirit of serving their client, so that no matter what, they are serving the client. Even if the building they produce, that they think serves the client, doesn't really serve the client because it's not very good."

Somehow the argument becomes infinitely more persuasive when adduced by Mr. Gehry no matter how elliptically stated.

Three Of Interest

Coming to terms with an iconic opera house:

We call them shells because that's how they look. Properly speaking, though, the [Sydney] Opera House is not a shell structure at all.

The shell idea thrilled architects of the mid-20th century because it looked effortless and was immensely difficult to achieve. The idea, though, is simple: in a structure shaped around natural stress patterns, the forces generated by self-weight will remain within the material, removing any need for external ribs, beams or buttresses.

Utzon's shells were never actually shells, even before they were re-formed into spherical sections to make the maths do-able. And, either way, the same fundamental problem would have arisen.

The problem is that they are three-dimensional gothic arches which generate huge outward thrust. The Opera House is really a gothic cathedral, sans buttresses. This necessitates the enormous tie-beam that holds the "shells" together underground and, in so doing, makes a proper orchestra pit impossible. Along with the narrow peninsula site and the sketch-decision to locate the two halls side-by-side, the shell idea meant the opera hall could never have orchestra pit, fly-tower or side-stages.

Which does not mean there is anything wrong with the building, just that we misnamed it. We could fix its faults by admitting it is not an opera house at all, never will be. It is not, really, architecture. It is a fabulous, transcendent piece of sculpture.

• RTWT here.

And more on the same from a different perspective:

In the second act of Swan Lake, elegant ballerinas, with white tutus fluttering, toes pointed, leap across the Sydney Opera House stage at speed and out of sight into the wings. What waits for them there must rank among the least graceful moves in all the world.

But it is one that has saved them from disaster, according to the ballet's artistic director and a former dancer, David McAllister.

"The girls would race off the ramp in the second act and we'd have someone there to catch them and push them off to the side, a bit like a football or handball, so the girls didn't go smashing into the wings," he says.

Their leap into the arms of a catcher, often a sturdy mechanist, has been necessitated in Swan Lake and other ballets over the years because the Opera Theatre has so little wing space. It is about two metres wide, a quarter of what the ballet has at its Melbourne venue. This makes exits at speed in the Opera Theatre risky: accidents must be avoided, but illusion - essential to the magic of theatre - must be maintained.

• RTWT here.

And finally, The Music Of The Spheres:

Of all the habits shared by ancient and modern people, stargazing may be the most serene. When we look up at a clear night sky, or view the fabulously beautiful pictures of stars and galaxies coming from the Hubble Space Telescope, we enter awestruck and humble into a magical realm that has the sacred hush of an ancient cathedral or a great art museum. We almost feel we should keep our voices down and turn off our cell phones out of respect.

So how would you feel if suddenly, as you quietly admired a dark and starry sky, you heard the stars making all kinds of crazy noises?

[...]

Einstein's theory of spacetime tells us that the real universe is not silent, but is actually alive with vibrating energy. Space and time carry a cacophony of vibrations with textures and timbres as rich and varied as the din of sounds in a tropical rain forest or the finale of a Wagner opera. It's just that we haven't heard those sounds yet. The universe is a musical that we've been watching all this time as a silent movie.

• RTWT here.

The Way To Do It

The Brit Guardian Unlimited has completed a major restructuring of its comprehensive coverage of the arts, and it’s a thing of beauty and marvelous to behold. Of particular interest is the reordering of its music coverage that now has separate sections for each music genre which automatically segregates coverage of classical music and opera and of jazz and blues from coverage of pop, rock, C&W, and other crap. It's the way to do it, and the way it should be done by every mainstream publication that pretends to authority in the music universe.

The Guardian may be unregenerately left-leaning politically, which is too bad, but in its arts coverage it's spot-on right (as in correct), and makes the arts coverage of mainstream dailies such as The New York Times look like it was put together by pretentious but purblind yokels.

Yes, And More's The Sorrow

What he said.

Take The Tour

A nifty tour via words and photos through Rem Koolhass' Seattle Public Library, Central Branch, courtesy of blogger James Tata of the eponymous blog.

Neato.

Eccentric?

(Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 12:24 AM Eastern on 12 May. See below.)

In the event you weren't already aware of the fact, composer, blogger, and all-around wit Fred Himebaugh of the Fredösphere is a rather, um, eccentric fellow. Witnesseth this little item. Oh, and Fred thinks Mozart an overrated composer as well.

Did I say eccentric?

Well, best to leave it at that, I suppose.

---

Update (12:24 AM Eastern on 12 May): Blogger David Sucher of City Comforts, in an update to this post of his, thinks my implied stance above vis-à-vis the architecturally brilliant Pilgrimage Chapel at Ronchamps reflects that of "the man in the street wearing a baseball cap." My withering response to that outrageous remark may be read in the comments section of his post.

On The Pritzker

First-rate post on the Pritzker Prize and this year's recipient, architect Thom Mayne, by writer on architecture and weblogger Nancy Levinson of Pixel Points.

That's A Relief

Architecture journalist and weblogger Nancy Levinson of Pixel Points corrects a misapprehension:

In a recent cyber-browse through the online literature, I noticed that my last post, on "neotraditional travel," was mentioned in the American Society of Landscape Architecture's Land Online and in David Sucher's City Comforts, and that in both cases my comments were read as a defense of New Urbanism. This isn't exactly what I'd intended, and so I'd like now to add some postscriptive thoughts — partly to clarify what I might have left vague in remarks that ranged (rather loosely) over a lot of ground, and partly to give some sense of my critical leanings.

[...]

Living in what you might call the Old Urbanist town of Cambridge, Mass., I am grateful for the convenience, the everyday ease, that comes with good public transit and dense walkable neighborhoods clustered around corner stores and small-scale retail strips. But New Urbanism hasn't become a phenomenal success because it promotes mixed-use zoning and multi-family housing and metropolitan light rail; it's become a phenomenal success because it is closely linked with a comfortably quaint aesthetic, with what Ada Louise Huxtable, in The Unreal America, has called "the genre of romantic recall." Style isn't the issue, New Urbanists will insist; and in principle it isn't. But in practice it's style that sells; and it's style that has made New Urbanism not just a movement but also a brand. Style is — of course — hard to argue with. Either you like something, or you don't. Either you stroll happily through a tidy New Urbanist town and admire the Italianate clock tower and the shingled cottages with the gabled roofs . . . or you feel (count me in) as if you've wandered into a warmed-over exercise in postmodern parody. That is — maybe — an exaggerated view of the usual range of aesthetic response. But somehow we've got to the point, in mass-market housing design, where architectural invention and exploration are mostly unsought, if not downright unwelcome.

Couldn't have said it as well myself although I tried in a post of 11 January 2003 on a previous weblog wherein I wrote, in part (names and no-longer-working links omitted):

M_____ has posted an impassioned, epic-length screed contra what he calls "modernist" architecture, by which he means all forms and styles of architecture practiced today by the elite of the architecture establishment (whose work M_____ contemptuously dubs "egotecture"; a neologism that may either be his or borrowed); those who get their work published in architectural journals such as, say, the Architectural Record as opposed to those architects whose work would never see the light of day in such journals but might be published in a consumer periodical such as, say, House and Garden. In other words, M_____ is against, say, a Mies or a Wright, and is all for...whatever mediocrity whose work the latter named periodical might find proper fodder for publication. (I can almost hear M_____'s objection to my saying he's against a Wright, giving me all sorts of reasons, with examples, why Wright would not be on his (s)hit list. But if he's reckless enough to attempt that, he'll find his arguments against elitist architects in shreds by his very own hand, with only the tiniest assist from me.)

M_____ is all for architecture movements with names such as Traditionalist, New-traditionalist, New-Classicism, and New Urbanism. And just what are these movements about? M_____ would say they're about architecture done by those who "...are more interested in user-centric values (comfiness, neighborhoods, context, tradition, craftsmanship) than they are in showing off their design prowess." I would say they're about building being done by those with essentially the same vision as William Levit when he built the first Levittown: offer the Common Man what he wants and feels comfortable with at the right price, and he will come — in droves. Buildings built according to the so-called Traditionalist, New Traditionalist, and New Classicism aesthetic are little more than nostalgic, picture-postcard-pretty confections; and communities designed according to the aesthetic of the New Urbanism, little more than upscale, prettified Levittowns — Levittown with tasteful historical elevations and details. Buildings and communities built according to these aesthetics positively reek of "comfiness"; the comfiness of an old shoe — or an earth-dug grave.

In short, they're all irredeemably dreadful as architecture; in fact do not even deserve to be called by that name. They're merely buildings built by builders, not architects with any aesthetic right to the title.

My views haven't changed one iota since writing that, nor do I expect them to change any time in future.

An Unhappy Prescience

[Apropos the publication of two new books dealing with the shameful catastrophe that is the rebuilding of the Ground Zero site — New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger's book, Up From Zero, and freelance journalist Philip Nobel's book, Sixteen Acres — and the buzz surrounding both books (here, and here, for two instances), I thought I would reprint an old weblog post of mine from February 2003. It herewith follows without further comment by me.]

It must be admitted that the Studio Daniel Libeskind design — the just announced winner of the LMDC design competition for the reconstruction of Ground Zero — meets to largely satisfying degree the crucial requirement of this site; embodies what the site must ultimately reflect and be. As I wrote previously concerning the then still in-progress design competition:

This occasion, this opportunity, this opportunity of opportunities, is not one for a contemplating of the anti-heroic. Whatever design finally emerges as the winning design for this site must be, at all scales and in every element, a veritable paradigm of the heroic; a paradigm of both monument and symbol — unambiguously monumental, and unambiguously symbolic — so that all who encounter the site from whatever conceivable vantage point can never mistake it for ordinary architectural space; can never be in doubt about precisely what it represents; can never, for even an instant, look on it or experience it as mere commercial or civic enterprise. And that must be true not only for NYC residents and gawking sightseers, but for all the world.

Now that the winner has been chosen, however, the back-and-forth bickering that before rose not much higher than a background murmur will now rise to a barely muted roar, and it will be heard. As things are shaping up even at this very early stage, it's already clear that at the final accounting the pimps and the politicians will ultimately have their way, and whatever disconnected and bastardized fragments of the original design remain will simply not be worth bickering about one way or another.

Whatever the aesthetic faults or merits of the Libeskind design (and there are sufficient of both), if built, it ought to be built in toto in strict accordance with the architect's original vision, typical and expected degrees of post-original-design adjustments of course excepted. That vision, after all, is presumably what won the design the competition — a competition for the most significant architectural project of the last 100 years, and perhaps of the next 100 — and therefore that vision ought to prevail. To have it not prevail would, of course, make a joke and charade of the entire design competition process, but much more importantly, would rob the ultimately finished project of any semblance of genuine aesthetic and symbolic integrity, and that simply ought not to be contemplated, much less countenanced.

But unhappily, what ought or ought not to be is pure armchair theorizing in such cases. As always in matters where political power and huge amounts of commercial money are at stake, the gulf between what ought to be and what will be is so vast as to be unbridgeable, and the handwriting is already beginning to show upon the wall.

The Libeskind design will never be built.

Breathtaking

Don't ask. Don't hesitate. Just click here now, right now, and be sure to click through once you're there, after having managed to catch your breath.

Ouroussoff On The New MoMA

The new architecture critic of The New York Times, Nicolai Ouroussoff, who replaces the erstwhile and widely reviled (but not by me) Herbert Muschamp, looks to be a real winner. If not quite in the same class as the great Ada Louise Huxtable, he nevertheless is a critic both well-informed and eloquent as his detailed descriptions of architect Yoshio Taniguchi's new design of the MoMA attest. And what overall does Mr. Ouroussoff think of the new building?

[T]he expanded museum is a serene composition that weaves art, architecture and the city into a transcendent aesthetic experience. Its crisp surfaces and well-proportioned forms clean up the mess that the building had become over the course of three expansions.

And what does Mr. Ouroussoff think the new MoMA's display organization has to say for itself?

[T]he layout [of the exhibitions] also suggests how the new Modern hews in many ways to the vision of the old Met. The main painting and sculpture galleries are stacked in reverse chronological order, with the bulk of the contemporary works on the second level; drawings, architecture and design on the third; works from 1945 to 1970 on the fourth; and 1880 to 1945 on the fifth. (Temporary exhibition spaces are at the very top.)

The vertical hierarchy evokes a Darwinian climb toward the canonical works of early Modernism. For an aspiring young artist craving acceptance, it may also bring to mind the rings of Dante's Inferno. It reinforces the notion - in a way not sensed at the Met today - that museums are as much about the stamp of legitimacy as about aesthetic pleasure.

This may irritate people who believe that a 21st-century museum should take a more populist approach. It runs counter to the idea that art, in a democracy, is a messy, open process. And it exposes the design's overwhelming assertion of control, beautiful yet chilling. But that is what powerful art institutions do: they set standards, they make evaluations. You could argue that Mr. Taniguchi is stripping away the egalitarian pose and exposing the museum for what it is.

And about time, too.

RTWT here.

Encouraging News

(Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 5:57 PM Eastern on 15 Sep. See below)

'Coup' in Viseu?

Confusion and despair as modernists 'moved in' to faculty positions

There have been conflicting reports this week from Portugal where an apparently modernist professor and faculty have been installed in the acclaimed Viseu New School of Architecture and Urbanism. There is now widespread concern that the work of the tradition-oriented faculty under José Cornélio da Silva will be lost. Reports from a wide range of sources suggest that the President of the Catholic University of Portugal at Viseu, Professor Passos Morgado and his colleague Antonio Carvalho had "orchestrate[d] a take over", without consulting existing teaching staff and in the face of the excellent work that has been done in the last 3 years.

[...]

At the first meeting of the new academic year, faculty report that they were "surprised" to find that they had a new Director of the Architecture school in the person of well-known Portuguese modernist Antonio Reis Cabrita, and a group of 13 new professors all reportedly drawn from Portugal's modernist architectural establishment.

[...]

The group reportedly arrived with a new curriculum, schedules, and all the bureaucratic work in place. When the new curriculum was rejected by indignant members of the existing faculty, a faculty member reported that the group became "confrontational and argumentative". A faculty member reports that, "They told us that they had instructions to change the school in every aspects, from the practical to the philosophical".

(Thanks to City Comforts — who thinks the coup less than encouraging — for the link.)

---

Update (3:35 PM Eastern on 15 Sep): BTW, if you're curious to know why I titled this post as I did, read the manifesto entitled, The Declaration of Viseu (it's short). It's the pre-coup declaration of purpose and principles adopted by this self-styled "school of architecture." What a horror.

Update (5:57 PM Eastern on 15 Sep): Just to give you a sense of why in the prior update I enclosed "school of architecture" within scare quotes, here are the required courses for the professional degree program at Viseu New School of Architecture and Urbanism, and at Princeton University School of Architecture (click on Master of Architecture). Understand now?

How Doth Your City Grow?

Says Douglas Kelbaugh FAIA, Dean, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning, University of Michigan, in his essay, Seven Fallacies In Architectural Culture:

Our cities are too often like a World’s Fair of one-off buildings, each an exception to the rule and gesticulating more wildly for attention than the next. They are scaleless and abstract, refusing to converse at all with their neighbors. An architectural circus of styles or a typological riot does not a city make. Nor are they emblematic of a democratic city, as Frank Gehry and others claim.

And says one urban planning zealot and weblogger (name withheld for the usual reason), whose highest aspiration for cities is that they be "interesting" and "comfortable," and "pleasant places to live," and who perceives a dichotomy where one must choose between architectural genius and "good rules" in the building of cities:

So many people use the word [genius] in relation to architects such as Wright or Gehry.... Those two might be geniuses or might not; who cares? [...] It is not genius which creates cities worthy of humanity but adherence to time-tested rules. Oh genius is OK, so long as it knows the rules well-enough to know if, how and when to break them. And so long as it has sufficient self-confidence to not need to impress by breaking the rules unless there is a good reason.

Interesting views of the matter. Fact is, though, that neither building styles, nor rules, time-tested or otherwise, nor architectural geniuses create "cities worthy of humanity." The urban needs and desires of city-dwellers alone create cities. The notion that architectural geniuses create (or, rather, are capable of creating) cities is a delusion of that most virulent of architectural types: the ideology obsessed architect-visionary. And the notion that rules create cities, a delusion of nuts-and-bolts obsessed sensible-shoes urban planners with their insufferable bourgeois arrogance born of the conceit that bourgeois concerns are the measure of all things, other concerns being but eccentricities or pie-in-the-sky imaginings to be more or less tolerated — or not.

But the urban needs and desires of city-dwellers need satisfaction in concrete terms. And for that architects, urban planners, and, yes, even cut-rate commercial builders are required, all with their parts to play, but governed always by the overarching principle, Sutor, ne supra crepidam!

Our weblogging urban planner imagines rules are what's really important. But that's the result of the confusing of what's truly important with what's merely necessary. Painters, for instance, require well-made canvas, but there's nothing important about well-made canvas, or about the mechanic who makes it. Both are merely necessary. What's important are the painter and what he paints on that canvas. The business of the maker of well-made canvas is to produce a product that provides the painter what he needs for his work, while presenting the least impediment to the painter in that work. And when the canvas-maker's mechanic's work is done, he disappears from the picture, so to speak, becoming an anonymous and invisible entity forever after.

Just so the urban planner. He must do his necessary mechanic's work by laying out the city's grid with due attention paid to the accommodation of traffic flows, utilities, public transport, zoning, etc., all consistent with the needs of present and foreseeable future populations; establish the most minimally restrictive building codes possible explicit enough so that compliance can be ascertained with little or no ambiguity or application of individual judgment; and then disappear forever so that the important work, the design and building of buildings, can begin unimpeded, all design decisions, in compliance with the minimally restrictive building codes, made exclusively by the only persons entitled to make them: the individual architects or builders and their clients. And if an architect also happens to be an architect of genius, well, so much the better for his client and for the city that will emerge from their work and the work of other architects, builders, and their clients — spontaneously.

In that way, and in that way only, do vital, exciting, nourishing, and enriching cities get built and grow; messy, contradictory, and complex affairs where good spaces coexist with bad ones, and where buildings run the full gamut from bad to good; from the thoroughly tawdry, to the quotidian utilitarian, to the great work of art. The one prescription for sure death for any city is to have individual building design decisions intrusively determined or overseen by rule-besotted urban planners, or, worse, visionary architectural ideologues, the end result of the operation of which always being an imposition of the same restricted vision on the fabric of an entire city.

If you want great cities, "cities worthy of humanity," then insist the rule-makers recognize their proper and very limited place, and that they disappear forever after their initial and necessary mechanic's work is done, leaving architects and builders free to get on with the important work of designing and building buildings to fulfill the needs and desires of their individual clients, as only by and through such a process, and of itself, doth "cities worthy of humanity" grow.

Art And Leaky Roofs

Apropos this post, a reader writes,

I think I understand your point, but it seems to me that any architecture (in your terms) which fails to meet the (again in your terms) lesser standards of mere building is still a failure. Architecture may indeed be art but if the roof leaks you haven't got a building but a sculpture - and I don't want to live or work in a sculpture.

And some time ago a weblogger wrote,

Would you want to live in one of [Frank Lloyd Wright's] houses? I wouldn't, for two main reasons. Most important is the way a Frank Lloyd Wright house never becomes your home; instead, you move in and become the curator of one branch of the Frank Lloyd Wright museum. You're just the custodian in a monument to his genius. For the other, I wouldn't want to be in charge of (let alone pay for) the upkeep. Wright couldn't resist trying out innovative building techniques — which has meant in practice that many of his houses are in semi-constant need of expensive repair.

[...]

The buildings work as they're supposed to only if you first submit to FLW — and submit totally. Give over to his genius, and then you'll have earned the right to experience the full, transcendent FLW experience. What if, on the other hand, you prefer to live by your own rules and you expect your house to play along?

So, to address the question in terms of a house specifically, what's wrong with these sentiments? I mean, it all sounds perfectly reasonable, does it not?

It does indeed — if you're talking about a tract house, or a stand-alone designed and built by one of those so-called New Urbanist or New Traditionalist architects, or by a builder along more or less conventional commercial lines. Such bourgeois concerns, however, are inappropriate when what's under consideration is a house designed by an architect of real aesthetic gift, and entirely out of place when what's under consideration is a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, an architect of genuinely transcendent aesthetic gift.

Wright's houses are notorious for their leaky roofs. As a house is the most elemental and paradigmatic instance of a shelter, a leaky roof would seem a most damning and fundamental fault. And so it would be were the house merely a building. With the possible exception of his very earliest work, none of Wright's houses qualifies as a mere building. They're all, as is all genuine architecture of any sort whatsoever, first and principally works of art. That's to say, a concern with the aesthetic trumped all else in their design, and that's only as it should be as that concern is architecture's principal defining characteristic. Such has it been from architecture's earliest beginnings, and such shall it always be.

Should Wright have taken more care in working out the nuts-and-bolts engineering details of his house designs? Perhaps. But it's not as if his houses were ever dangers to, posed undue difficulties for, or were even experienced as inconvenient by, their original owners; not even the structurally problem-plagued, cutting-edge-innovative, and justly aesthetically world-famous Kaufmann house, "Fallingwater", which only today, some 65 years after its building, is (was) in danger of collapsing without extensive (and wildly expensive) correction of its fundamental engineering faults. Like Kaufmann, Wright's clients were invariably thrilled by, and felt privileged to own and occupy, what Wright gave them.

I'm perfectly willing to confess freely that Wright played fast and loose with the nuts-and-bolts engineering details of all his buildings. After establishing that a design he envisioned could be built without subsequently falling down or otherwise causing harm to his client, he considered attention to that sort of detail to be merely a nuisance, most especially if closer attention to such engineering details might have indicated that an aesthetic detail(s) would have to be altered in consequence. Wright's attitude to his buildings, and to his clients and their use of those buildings, is best summed up in his (in)famous retort to a client who, at first, bitched to Wright about the leaks in the roof of his new house. Said Wright, "That's what happens when you leave a work of art out in the rain."

Glib, arrogant, cavalier, and the effusion of a monstrous ego most certainly, but in Wright's case, essentially true nevertheless. And only an architect of Wright's transcendent genius could (or should) get away with saying — and brag about saying — such a thing.

And what about the whine of, "...a Frank Lloyd Wright house never becomes your home.... [...] You're just the custodian [of] a monument to his genius. [...] What if....you prefer to live by your own rules and you expect your house to play along?"

In short, and straightaway to the point, the answer is you let your fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages, and from there select a good, solid, bourgeois builder to build your house for you, and leave the all-too-rare Wrights of this world free to serve those worthy of their genius.

See how that works?

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.