A Tablet from Heaven?

A good deal of ink has been spilled arguing the merits of Apple’s Ipad tablet during the weeks since its launch. Apple’s hype has been almost messianic, with the great Jobs calling the new gadget magical about twenty times in his presentation. I admit to being an Apple devotee, but this put me off a bit. The inflated Iphone will not change your life, and may not even sell very well in a depressed economy. But, should we dismiss this new portable entertainment device without considering its potential?

As the author of four books with another on the way, I have mixed feelings about the emergence of Kindles and other digital book avatars. Amazon has nearly killed the book publishing industry with its punitive discounts. We need traditional books, and will continue to enjoy reading them for the foreseeable future. The Kindle has not yet made a real dent in book sales, and many find its screen cold and impersonal.

The question is, can a tablet with dazzling color rendition become an alternative form of media dissemination in an era when other forms are vanishing? Notwithstanding the spate of cool Iphone Apps that may run on the Ipad, there is a very large untapped market for rich visual media that can be carried in a light, portable device, enriched by text, music, video and other as yet undiscovered means of communication. Apple has been clever in opening the doors to these kinds of innovation in the past. Will it do so with the latest miracle device?

As an architect who writes for a broad audience, and likes to see lots of color in books, I am aware of the economic limitations of color printing in a paper format. What if that drawback were eliminated in tablet publishing? What if other media could be combined with text and photos? Wouldn’t art and architecture publishing benefit profoundly from these new methods of “printing?”

I can’t help but believe that, sooner or later, this generation or next will figure out a way to present the wonders of the visual world with the kind of sharp clarity that we now appreciate digital film and music. What a dazzling show that will be.

“No” to a Green Federal Building?

There has been so little money from the Federal stimulus package devoted to clean energy that many of us are losing hope that the Obama administration will do anything to move this critical agenda along. It doesn’t help when we learn that “the party of no” has found a way to block even modest steps to build green buildings for the Federal Government.

Today’s New York Times reports that John McCain and Tom Coburn,  Senators from Arizona and Oklahoma, described an innovative proposed building in Portland, Oregon as the second worst stimulus-financed project on the G.S.A.’s current list. Though not much to look at, James Cutler’s 18-story Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building will be one of the most energy efficient high-rise structures in the U.S. if it ever gets built. It will have a giant “green  wall” of plants on an 18-story trellis, solar cells on the roof, a rainwater retention system, high-efficiency lighting fixtures, and many other recommended technologies for the next generation of office buildings. It even avoids the use of costly steel structure, using concrete instead.

Though McCain is not a climate-change naysayer, and is from a state that will need solar and wind power in the near future, he has lined up with his colleagues to stop needed investment in clean energy projects. Coburn, for his part, has led the supercilious “scientific” arguments against climate-change for years. What seems clear is that even sensible, non-partisan issues like energy efficient Federal facilities development has become a “no-go” issue for the GOP.

Now that China has blasted past the U.S. in the clean energy development race, a Sputnik moment if there ever was one, how will our government respond? Not with a bang but with a shrug, it seems.

Goodbye J.D.–goddam genius

Men of a certain age, and women too, can’t think of adolescence without images of Holden Caufield or Franny Glass. We hold on to the stories and novels of J.D. Salinger despite his ornery refusal to have given us but a few tidbits to chew on all these years. Now that he is gone, we’re still wistful and angry.

Yes, young people that weren’t born during the baby boom have their J.D. But our generation lived the contradictions of Salinger’s youthful angst. The Cuban missile crisis, the blacklist, the deaths of Kennedys and Kings and Monroes. It all goes together with that up yours attitude that Salinger grabbed out of the air in the early ’50s and made into a cultural badge of honor. Without J.D. there couldn’t have been a Jim Morrison, a Grace Slick, or maybe even a Richard Prior.

Will we miss you J.D., you goddam genius? No, because we said goodbye thirty years ago. But then again, we could use a little angry, ironic, irreverent fiction right now, the kind only you can write.

Ice Cream Castles Everywhere

It gets harder and harder to say anything positive about lavish, gigantic, costly, vacant buildings. But leave it to the architectural press to find faint words of praise for Steven Holl’s Linked Hybrid in Beijing, SOM’s Burj Khalifa (minus the word Dubai) in Dubai, and Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI building in Rome. Looking more and more like gigantic follies on a planet struggling to survive an economic and environmental crisis, these buildings were conceived during a decade of decadence and and unbridled consumption seen last only during the fall of the Roman Empire. Of the three multi-zillion square foot monstrosities, only the Holl building stands a chance of gaining tenants, at least when the Chinese figure out how to sell leases for spaces in locations so bizarre that most residents will never find them.

Each work, by a bona fide “starchitect,” is based on a conceit that is neither new nor timely, despite statements to the contrary. A veritable Tower of Babel, the Burj now stands over 2600 feet tall, 1000 taller than any other human-made object, amidst a desert city that may never recover from its glut of spending and borrowing during the past decade. Since its floors are too small to fit offices, the developer insists that the mega-rich will want to purchase luxury apartments on most of its 160 floors. So far demand has been, shall we say, tepid in a place that is usually very hot. Perhaps this ugly needle will herald the end of the skyscraper sweepstakes, a contest that reached its artistic apogee with the Chrysler Building almost a century ago.

Then there is the Hugh Ferris parody called “Linked Hybrid.” (Some of us remember Ferris as the visionary renderer who drew “streets in the air” during the 1920s in his Metropolis of Tomorrow–but recent critics don’t seem to recognize these precedents.) As if to remind us that the World Trade Center was a bad idea, Holl has given the world another building with a gridded, structural exoskeleton that  purportedly provides miles of column-free space hundreds of feet above the ground. Actually there are interior columns, disguised as L-shaped walls, probably also built to enclose plumbing and HVAC chases. The concept of sky bridges hasn’t proved successful in cities like Minneapolis or Houston, where climate drives pedestrians indoors, so why does Holl insist that his 650-unit high rise will “have enough density to keep both loops active,” meaning the ground areas and the high wire swimming pool bridges. Yes, there is a swimming pool in one of the links–go figure. Should we be surprised that the developer has spent 12 months trying to sell just one merchant on the idea of renting space in one of the zooty sky bridges? Again, the future looks a lot like the Modernist past, repeating failed ideas in new packaging.

It’s even harder to take the MAXXI seriously, since even its architect can’t be bothered to justify its vacuous formalism. With only 13 buildings to her credit, Hadid is “the prophet of what has come to be known as digital architecture,” notes John Seabrook in a New Yorker profile. Though MAXXI is actually an acronym for the museum’s title in Italian (Museo delle Arte nello Siecolo XXI), it is hard not to consider it some kind of strange feminist pun invented by the iconoclastic architect. In the profile she comes off as a Hollywood prima donna obsessed with her appearance, clothes, eating, texting on her phone 24/7, and intent on shocking the public with both her buildings and her  behavior. A cross between Barbara Streisand and Lady Gaga, the Baghdad-born English architect continues to dazzle critics with her Futuristic, increasingly anti-functional designs. The capital F is for Futurism, the early 20th century Italian art movement that Hadid uses to fuel her imagination–her aesthetic is a rehash of the speed freak ideologies of a bygone age. In the MAXXI, the Italians got Futurism a century late, and still can’t quite understand it. No 21st century art hangs in the galleries, since there are no walls on which to hang paintings. No sculptures are there to compete with the concrete strands of “fettucine” that Hadid uses for structure. Videos and laser art won’t be noticed either, because the building is center stage. During the opening, the only art appeared to be the architect herself, who was dressed in a “short, diaphanous petrol-blue chiffon cape” and a “white-gold pendant that looked like a sommelier’s cup.” It is hard to imagine a more extreme example of the art museum as a monument to its architect–and this after Frank Lloyd Wright’s New York Guggenheim, and Frank Gehry’s Bilbao museum with the same name, seemed to exhaust the genre.

The Emperor of Ice Cream is still creating castles out of thin air. When will we realize that the eye candy we’re eating is just dust?

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.