The Return of Rationality?

About ten years ago the Architectural Record, I suppose feeling that it was no longer a cutting edge publication, initiated a yearly survey of what was supposed to be cutting edge in design.The magazine continued to publish the work of well-established firms, mainly starchitects, while also noting the emergence of what it calls the Design Vanguard. (Note the clever avoidance of avant garde). For most of the last decade the DV firms were indeed out there on the edge of what most architects do, and much of the work was, frankly, not worth looking at. We saw light construction, virtual  transparencies, blobs, shards, computer morphs, mobius strips, and every manifestation of formal gobbledygook. Whenever the dreaded issue arrived I would simply toss it in the nearest trash bin.

This year I was curious about the vanguard. Would the young turks be angry at the collapse of capitalist excess like the rest of us? As I leafed through the pages I sensed a real change in attitude. Projects were smaller, more modest, and deliberately less complex (and expensive). Less was patently unbuildable. Most astonishingly, fewer designers were loathe to use parallel planes. The words “order,” “simple,” “historical,” “natural,” and “craft” appeared, and often! Were my eyes deceiving me?

Dare I say that these architects generally designed within the bounds of economical, buildable, and socially useful forms, usually rectangular ones. When Modernism was a vanguard, this attitude was called “rational,” and architects saw order not as one concept among many, but a manifestation of the human brain’s need for structure and symmetry. As we know more and more about the brain, it appears that the term “rationality” can be more precisely associated with forms that are conducive to the brain’s tendency to project an ordered world.

One architect in particular, seemed to project this very human sensibility–Spain’s Jose Maria Sanchez-Garcia. Even his name has an Everyman kind of ring–Joseph John Q. Jones-Smith, roughly translated. His work is simple, modest, appropriate, and kind to the environment. Will more young architects begin to design in this way? I hope so. Rational architecture is universal–classical architecture is the ultimate rational architecture. Modern forms that echo the order of the classical world, like some shown in this “vanguard,” will last more than a generation. Perhaps they should have called it the “rear guard.”

R.I.P. Prairie Avenue Bookshop

When Victor Hugo wrote that the book would kill the building, he obviously hadn’t considered that in 150 years a digital information revolution would transform knowledge of all kinds. Even Jules Verne had nothing about cyberspace in any of his science fiction. Now that Google has digitized half the texts in the Harvard library, it is time to be scared about the death of the book itself. The news is not good.

As an architect and historian I have collected beautiful architectural books for 40 years and delight in every new volume I read. I’ve spent many happy hours looking over the catalogs of architectural booksellers like Ben Weinreb in London and Geoffrey Steele in Pennsylvania, when they were in business. And, like most architects of a certain age, I’ve gotten my share of catalogs from the Prairie Avenue Bookshop in Chicago. It’s been an old friend who I never thought I’d lose.

So I was saddened and surprised to read today of the demise of that venerable repository of knowledge about buildings, cities, gardens and other constructed objects. The current economy has taken its toll on all booksellers, even giants like Amazon and Borders, so I might well have suspected that smaller stores would be threatened. But still I cannot quite accept the fact that a supporter of great architecture like Prairie Avenue is gone. Marilyn and Bill Hasbrouck are entitled to a restful retirement, and I wish them well. But there is something wrong when the profession loses a vital repository of the best in architectural publishing.

Our buildings and environments are better when designers are literate. Young architects read too many blogs and play too many computer games already. Like most aesthetes, architects love beautiful books, and occasionally read them. Take away a source of those books and fewer literate architects will emerge from behind their computer monitors. Rest in peace, Prairie Avenue Bookshop. You’ll be sorely missed, and no Kindle can replace you.

Interstate End State

When the last gasoline powered vehicle finally gives up the ghost, whither its residue? That question is beginning to interest a cohort of thinkers beyond the closed doors of the Sierra Club’s board of directors. Evidence can be found in many places, including now the editorial pages of the New York Times.

Yes, the antique car collectors will be vindicated beyond their wildest dreams, but what of the rest of us? Should Americans be concerned that most of the money from the $700 billion stimulus package is being used to repair the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System? Karrie Jacobs, a journalist for Metropolis magazine, likes the idea of fixing the Interstates, but not because it will keep more cars on the road. She is looking ahead, while most of the country is still mired in the bygone era of transportation liberty. One man, one vote, one car.

Her radical idea is that the tentacles of our massive road infrastructure be re-engineered to serve as rail or light rail corridors for a truly modern transportation network,  one that Europe is already building and Asia is planning. “The highway system can’t always be a ghetto for the internal combustion engine,” she argues. It should become an artery for new technologies that bring us closer to sustainability. She also suggests that highways be refitted to become clean energy pipelines, carrying not oil but electricity from alternative sources.

Like most of the dinosaurs left over from the age of big oil, the highway system should be retired. It should not, however, be demolished. Adaptive reuse must become a widespread strategy for re-envisioning the environment for a sustainable future. One of the frustrations of dealing with LEED standards for “greening” the built world is that the program has given little thought to re-use of resources like roads, bridges, and rail corridors. New York has taken the bold step of converting a rusting rail viaduct into a wonderful urban park–the High Line. Other cities are contemplating similar schemes for reusing infrastructure. The Interstates make up the biggest piece of man-made real estate in the U.S., and will soon be a white elephant.

We can still maintain Woody Guthrie’s “ribbon of highway” as a part of the American myth if we live up to the promise of ingenuity and imagination that underpins that great story. Admitting the folly of our dependency on gasoline is the first step. Making use of our expensive and redundant road system will be the next.

The Top Ten

The Architectural Record is the oldest architectural periodical in America and one of the world’s longest running (it was founded in the 1890s as an offshoot of a real estate periodical in New York). Once it was a majestic presenter of the best design in the world’s most powerful nation, with writers like Herbert Croly, Montgomery Schuyler, Louis Mumford, and A. Lawrence Kocher on the masthead. Today it has a small circulation by past standards, and caters mostly to members of the American Institute of Architects, for which it is the official media organ. As I’ve said before in these pages, architectural publishing is in the doldrums, and this magazine does little to raise standards of criticism. The Architect’s Newspaper, an internet and small market publication, is fresher, more informative, and far more pluralistic in its criticism. As a member of the AIA, I receive Record “free,” but otherwise wouldn’t bother reading it.

Record publishes glossy, praiseworthy articles about “top ten” architects and projects in various categories virtually every month, as if competition in the art of building could be measured in degrees. There is the annual Record Houses issue, once a barometer for the best in domestic architecture, but now a curiosity. The Progressive Architecture Design Awards, and the AIA Honor Awards are also published annually. The former was once the pride of a competing journal, but now must beg for space in its former rival’s pages. The competition these days is for space in a media forum that architects and clients respect and read regularly. Sadly, media sources are few and far between. The David Letterman Show could have fun with a parody of this situation, if anyone cared.

This month the magazine featured a cautious article about the nation’s “top ten architecture schools.” In the glory days of American architectural education, about 40 years ago, such a ranking would be ludicrous. In a profession marked by elitism and a closed network of masters and proteges, one knew the best schools as a matter of professional savoir faire. This year’s publication of academic rankings by a private communications/management firm (run by a former AIA executive director) is on the one hand a necessity in a changed marketplace, on the other an admission of defeat among the design elite who run the top schools. The old order is changing.

Despite some criticism in the article, the methodology upon which the survey is based is sound: ask practicing architects, students, clients, and faculty to rate the best architectural schools in the U.S., adding a few categories to sort out special programs. Emphasize training that prepares a student to practice architecture in the current marketplace. The results should be pretty indicative of what’s out there, and may be useful to everyone who cares about quality in architecture.

I would wager, however, that a lot of architecture professors and deans are fuming about various biases in the data. Bastions of architectural “theory” like Princeton, SciArc, and Cranbrook are conspicuously absent from all the lists. They should be, because their students are not trained to work in the profession. Classical and traditional schools such as Notre Dame, the University of Miami, and Georgia Tech are also absent, perhaps for similar reasons of bias. Only one school emphasizing “sustainability” makes the list–the University of Oregon (not a traditionally strong program). Only a handful of “polytechnic” universities (with engineering or tech emphasis) are listed.

Two of the nation’s top universities, Harvard and Yale, top the graduate school rankings, as they do in law and medicine. In both status and quality, they are undoubtedly premier programs. The undergraduate list is led by two traditionally strong programs, Cornell and Syracuse, that had slipped in recent years but appear to be on the right track again. From that standpoint we might as well be looking at a 1960 ranking. But below the top some interesting trends are emerging.

The consumer is taking charge in a marketplace once governed by rules of art. Virginia Polytechic and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo are in the top ten! Prestigious private universities are being pushed out by schools that offer value priced education, even in an elite profession. This trend says a lot about both higher education generally and the specifics of training practicing professionals today. Neither students nor practicing architects are being well-served by bastions of theory and art.

Though Record seems reluctant to acknowledge a sea change in the educational realm, its publication of “popular” rankings may signal a thawing in policies that proscribe the publication of architecture that is not by “top ten” starchitects. Unfortunately, the cover of the magazine shows a bizarre building in New York by Thom Mayne of Morphosis.  To me it looks like a giant fig leaf covering some unflattering genital protrusions. Oh, and it’s a building for Cooper Union, which didn’t make the list.

Art and Anthropology

News flash. Anthropologists, while busy discovering new missing links every other month, have noticed that early humans made art. Furthermore, it appears that artistic endeavor was predicated on crafting things that humans, then and now, found beautiful. Dennis Dutton, a professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, has written a book about this. In today’s New York Times he asks if today’s “conceptual” artists are producing “art” at all.

I have argued here and elsewhere that the pursuit of beauty, in all its forms, is a necessary factor in the making of paintings, architecture, poetry, music, sculpture–any fine art, and most applied arts. For the past century or so, conceptual artists have abandoned this pursuit, and, while many provocative works have appeared, art has suffered. Dennis correctly asks whether the works of such artists as Damien Hirst will remain in the canon a hundred years from now.

Perhaps it is ironic that scientists–particularly neuroscientists mapping the brain and anthropologists mapping human evolution–are making profound contributions to the understanding of art and music these days. Art critics, self-involved as they are, have generally not noticed these discoveries. Antonio Damasio’s critique of rationalism has dismantled much of the philosophical scaffolding that many artists and architects use to justify their work. Scientists analyzing the evolution of the brain continue to point out that aesthetic pleasure is hard-wired, not culturally derived. In short, those who argue that contemporary art has moved beyond the true and the beautiful are wrong.

Well, “chacun a son gout” and all that. Those who enjoy looking a medicine cabinets and embalmed sharks are entitled to spend millions on Mr. Hirst’s work. For me, the Museum of Natural History has better examples of animal parts. But let’s stop denigrating the legitimate work of artists and architects who spend their careers mastering the techniques and crafts that are necessary for artistic production as it has existed for thousands of years. Our old brains still respond to beauty.

Shades of Green: Light, Dark, Brownish, Olive

Television has discovered sustainable architecture. The Sundance Channel is offering several shows that feature “green” themes. PBS has Building Green, a show with an attractive subject and a telegenic host–Kevin Contreras (who looks like he has just walked off the set of “The Bachelor”). Apparently following the formula of the “makeover” programs, Building Green offers the story of a house under construction in hopes of drawing in the curious home improver or builder. The premise of the program is that everyone with a little cash and an adventurous spirit can build an energy efficient home.

Contreras is a building contractor and the son of a contractor. He knows his way around a hammer and is enthusiastic about every new thing he sees. He lives in beautiful Santa Barbara, California. His new house has a little bit of a Spanish feel and sits on a spectacular mountain site. Central casting could not have chosen a better star or location.

Contreras follows the proven formula of “learning” about green building from experts who offer their views and products on the show, much as Bob and Norm did on This Old House. Viewers can take some of the advice with a grain of salt, as the self interest of the “green” merchants is pretty transparent at times. Like many PBS programs, the producers make an attempt to present a counter argument to many views. That being said, there are some problems with the views they do present as far as a “green”  pedigree is concerned.

Contreras and the producers of the program have chosen to construct their dream house out of a range of materials that offer savings in initial cost, embodied energy, and “life cycle” costs. However, not all the materials offer the same degree of “green” benefit. The shades of green are not the same when one considers, for instance, that the straw bales that are used for the walls cannot support the structure of the roof or floors of the building. Straw bales are alternative materials with wonderful insulating characteristics, and they can be used in applications where low tech construction reduces the energy consumed in framing the building. Unfortunately, the producers of Building Green elected to build the frame of their rather gigantic, luxury home out of steel. As the host admits, steel is not a particularly green material, as its production uses massive amounts of energy. So there is immediate paradox in the premises of the show–if only half your house uses alternative energy sources and materials, how “green” is it?

Other issues present similar dilemmas. The labor consumed in covering the straw bale walls with lime stucco was astoundingly costly, consuming “several months” according to Contreras. Thus any savings in material would be eclipsed by the cost of installation. The windows were fabricated out of reclaimed wood, but the cost of custom fabrication was many times that of standard wood windows. The host attempts to locate a manufacturer of low V.O.C. exterior paint and finds that no such product exists at the present time. The list goes on.

The green building industry is struggling with many similar conundrums as it attempts to become part of the mainstream in the construction marketplace. It may be unfair to quibble about a few overly optimistic claims made in the interest of generating enthusiasm for a new approach to home construction that will have clear benefits in the future. However, it seems entirely fair to ask that the first television show to present these new options do so with scrupulous honesty and integrity. What shade of green should a prospective home builder expect in the current marketplace? Light green? Perhaps. Olive green? More likely? Bright, shiny, emerald green? Not a chance.

How Big is Too Big?

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2008: the world is watching as a building rises to surpass the height of all previous human-made objects. Its architects and builder will not reveal the final altitude of their creation. Size matters. They won’t accept second place in the tall building Olympics. How big will it be?

Most of us know the end of that story–the Burj Dubai became the world’s tallest building at 818 meters (2684 feet). We live in a society obsessed with growth, wealth, obsessive eating, size, mass, volume, area. It’s all about big. Huge even. Everything has to be bigger, better, faster, louder, more powerful, more luxurious. The Biggest Loser vies with Survivor for ratings on television. It’s ironic that the biggest losers will be humans when the global energy crisis leaves little to sustain life. The Survivors will be the cockroaches.

A profound new book by Quaker economists has posed the question of why seven billion people continue to behave as if the earth’s resources were infinite. Each month economists publish figures for GDP percentage increases, stock index gains, inflation, national wealth. The message is that growth in economic activity, increases in monetary wealth, and expansion of all kinds of technology will outpace the degradation of the earth’s systems and save the planet from ruin before 2100. Most ecologists are not sanguine about these prospects.

Instead, Peter G. Brown and Geoffrey Garver argue that humankind should seek a “right relationship” between sustainable economic activity and the earth’s delicate biosphere. All current evidence from climatologists, biologists, ecologists and other earth scientists is that the current pace of economic growth is not only too great, but that significant retrenchment will be required if humans are to save themselves and their environment from catastrophic ruin in the next century. What does this mean for a society that wants to build “bigger and better” with every new technological leap?

Among the prescient messages in this book is that one of our society’s most destructive obsessions is the quest for bigger economies and more stuff. While many of us profess a desire to live with less, we fail to understand that less does not mean a small step backward in personal wealth and consumption. Less means a complete transformation of our expectations for personal fulfillment, affluence, material wealth and physical well-being.

When it comes to how we live, and the spaces we inhabit, our vocabulary and standards for adequate accommodation are about to change in ways we never thought possible. Americans in particular will be forced to live with less. Our houses will be subdivided, our rooms diminished in size, our possessions curtailed. And we will become wealthier as members of the commonwealth of life on our planet, if not at the bank or stock brokerage.

My Kingdom for a Swimsuit

Some people think that technology in sports is a non-issue. Steroids, blood doping and new snowboard compounds should be considered outside the realm of athletic performance, as if we were still in ancient Athens watching naked male runners stride around a dirt track from stone seats. I’m not one of those people.

Technology has invaded every cell in our bodies, every joint in our limbs, every corner of our houses. If we drive high performance cars and ride high performance bikes, we may as well improve performance in every area of our existence. Viagra and cialis are supposed to be for men with erectile dysfunction, but advertisers wink when they show television spots with virile looking older men and nubile younger partners.

The recent controversy over hyper buoyant swimsuits and world records should be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. At least until scientists perfect a genetic compound that will make human skin into a replica of dolphin hide, the Lazer suit and its progeny will remain the ne plus ultra of techology invading the realm of human sporting performance, and we should attend to its effects.

Consider the fact that Michael Phelps is likely to be the most gifted swimmer who ever did a flip turn, and that he was just beaten by an upstart who was four seconds slower a year ago and you will understand the gravity of this problem. Science has provided humans with methods of defying gravity, decoding genes, and flying to Mars. There is no reason to think that technological progress will stop pushing the envelope in the next century, with the result that robots will think and feel analogous to humans, and humans will be filled with bionic parts that slow the aging process. However, the line between what is human and what is not must be drawn definitively and soon or we will lose what is most precious to our species. Star Trek gave us warnings about this issue in the 1960s and science fiction continues to probe the ethics of artificial versus human nature.

The beauty and majesty of human movement, and of the body’s capacity for new physical achievements, should not be tainted by any form of technology that creates a false advantage or which eliminates an inherently natural limitation in what animals (humans) can do. Athletic regulations, standards and governng organizations have been lax in examining the role of technology in sports. It is high time ethicists (who look a medical issues) and other philosophical and psychological experts looked seriously at challenges to our most basic physical and mental capacity for “performance” in many realms, not just sports. Hats off to Mr. Phelps for forcing the issue. Now we can tackle the harder question of how to make a swimsuit that makes any woman’s body look like that of a supermodel. Now that would be technology we could believe in.

The Price of Abstraction: Disaster at the East Wing

John Russell Pope’s original National Gallery of Art is one of the world’s greatest museum buildings, and only gets better with age. Not only does every exhibition look magnificent in the top-lit galleries, but the gleaming marble exterior shimmers throughout the day, dominating the mall with its quiet monumentality. When I.M. Pei added his vaunted East Wing in the 1970s, critics were quick to compare its angled, abstract surfaces with those of the Pope building. I have never been impressed with the East Wing, either as a compelling museum interior or as a monument worthy of a place on the mall in Washington. Though clad in the same marble as its predecessor, Pei’s building always appeared to be made of white cardboard, like a flimsy architectural model.

Well, recent developments have proved that the Pei building was not constructed with the same care and durability as earlier museums from the Beaux Arts era in Washington. After only 35 years the marble panels on the exterior have begun to fail, endangering pedestrians and worrying the museum staff. When initially designed, Pei defended his triangular masses by trumpeting their pure abstraction. Abstraction was a watchword of modernism in all the arts, but in architecture it proved very difficult to achieve. The desire for taut surfaces and invisible joints drove designers to employ clever details that allowed buildings to look like monolithic sculptures of glass, metal or stone while also floating effortlessly in space. Details that allowed buildings to be built with thin veneers of stone, like those of the East Wing, were devised de novo by engineers and architects who believed that new technologies would make pure abstraction possible. If an architect built a paper or cardboard model and wanted his building to look like paper or cardboard, presto, a technology would be invented to accommodate his conceit. Pei’s partner, Harry Cobb, tried such a gimmick at the Hancock tower in Boston and spent most of career defending lawsuits after glass panels rained from the sky. Never mind those 37-degree angled joints at the corners–just caulk the hell out of them!

Today, the venerable Mr. Pei will have to answer for a similar act of hubris thirty five years ago. It’s interesting to look at the kind of elegant abstraction of surface and detail that Pope achieved at the National Gallery in the early 1940s, using carved blocks of Tennessee marble laid as a bearing veneer against a steel structure. Pope used the wisdom of classical building design and construction dating back to Roman times, combining it with the latest structural techniques of his own time. Instead of inventing details to serve a design imperative, he learned from past masters and adapted proven details to a new problem.

Engineer Robert Silman and his talented staff will probably figure out a way to re-attach Pei’s marble/cardboard panels, albeit at enormous cost and embarrassment to the gallery administration. He did something similar for Frank Lloyd Wright at Fallingwater and the Guggenheim. At a time when material scarcity and high energy costs are driving the building industry, have we the right to spend resources fixing the mistakes of every architect who put his ego ahead of sound construction practice? Since Pei’s East Wing has won countless awards from fellow architects, there is little choice but to find a solution to this nasty public safety problem. Perhaps next time a major museum constructs a piece of abstract sculpture and calls it architecture, someone will ask for curtain wall tests before issuing a C.O. Oh, and by the way, the Guggenheim board ought to put some pesos away for fixing another architect’s folly. It won’t be long before titanium starts flying around in major cities throughout the globe.

Navel architecture, or novel architecture?

I keep waiting for Nicolai Ouroussoff, the Times architecture critic, to write a piece that actually addresses the architecture it purports to criticize. Today’s article, an extended spread on the work of Japanese architect Toyo Ito, reads exactly like Ouroussoff’s expose on _________, the last architect he purported to cover. Designs of “striking inventiveness” and marked “orginality” are illustrated. An opera house turns classicism on its head and “liberates us from the oppressive weight of history.” Yada yada yada.

Ouroussoff wants to like Ito’s work, but his template for the next “heroic genius” architect doesn’t fit idiocyncratic designers very well. And Ito doesn’t like being pidgeonholed. So Our Critic can’t check off all the boxes on his standard list of “heroic genius” virtues. That’s too bad, because Ito has a lot of virtues worth examining in depth.

It’s not so much that Ouroussoff is ideological, as academic critics tended to be in past decades, as that he can’t stop looking at himself before settling his gaze on the architect of the month. And he isn’t a complete narcisist like Herbert Muschamp, his notorious predecessor, either. The problem is that Ouroussoff, who should demonstrate intellectual rigor, some catholicism of taste, and a consistent critical perspective, is a one-note wonder.

Toyo Ito is a fascinating if elusive designer who produces buildings that fit their places and programs with an almost mystical resonance. Each building is different from the last, making it impossible to attach a starchitect label to the work. How refreshing? In a society that marks everything with a media tag or consumer mantra, this architect resists classification.

Times readers might learn a lot about what makes an architect truly original through Ito’s work. But their critic can’t stop looking at his own agenda long enough to notice that he’s been handed a plumb assignment. He’s obssessed with a few criteria that look a lot like the old avant-garde program for revolution in the arts. To him a peach looks like an orange–they’re each round and about the same color.