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.

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.

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.

Alice Tully’s makeover: dry, dull, uncomfortable

Among the New York Times’ consistently excellent music critics, Allan Kozinn is often the odd man out. He writes intelligently about concerts on the margins, while also standing up for many traditional performances and artists of the old guard. He sometimes sounds a bit prickly, which is one of the things I most admire about him. Today he struck a blow for those of us who loved the “old” Alice Tully Hall and are sad to see it gone.

Liz Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, the architects of the project, are freshening up Lincoln Center, ostensibly because the “closed and elitist” language of this 1960s landmark has turned away the concertgoing public. As with much that is transforming American cultural institutions during the recession, Lincoln Center’s motives for changing its buildings and public spaces are rather short-sighted. Putting more bodies in the seats at the expense of preserving the longstanding value of a cultural landmark, the LC administration hired a trendy, “conceptual” architectural firm to update its public spaces. Unfortunately, a casualty of this makeover was one of the city’s best concert venues.

Kozinn’s appraisal of the Alice Tully Hall renovation is written from the point of view of a discerning listener as well that of a regular patron who demands a commodious venue in which to enjoy many kinds of music. He does not swoon, as many have, over the “transparency” of the cantilevered lobby looming over Broadway. He finds the high tech lighting in the new hall rather gimmicky after the first visit. He minces no words about his view of the acoustics and general performance of the new hall–”I hate the new Tully Hall.”–strong condemnation from a leading music critic in view of the almost universal praise that followed the opening some months ago.

To those who have followed the career of Diller and Scofidio, Kozinn’s views should come as no surprise. Like many contemporary “starchitects,” these designers care little about the experience of patrons who regularly use their buildings. They were among the most arcane, abstruse and arid of the “conceptual” artist-architects of the 1970s and 1980s. Mixing performance, texts and often unbuildable collages in their early work, Diller and Scofidio developed their reputations as “paper architects.” Like Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, and Daniel Liebeskind, they professed their disdain for building–that is, until they began to make money doing it.

It is little wonder, then, that Kozinn finds the new concert hall numbingly dull, colorless, and inhospitable to music. He questions the decision to fill the bright, large lobby with a restaurant rather than leaving space for patrons to mill about the space. He finds little to praise about the hall’s new interior. Pietro Belluschi’s warm wood and comfortable red seats in the old hall were beloved of patrons. I remember many wonderful performances in the Belluschi hall, which was intimate, sonically rich, and popular with performers. Why was it renovated? I suspect that the administration and the architects simply saw a chance to “re-brand” the hall with a hot new designer’s label. Their attitude shows clearly, if ironically, in the choice of a new location for the portrait of Alice Tully that once stood in the lobby–a small vestibule adjacent to the ladies’ rest room.

No one questions the need for a larger lobby and a better circulation system at Tully. The original location at the back of the Juilliard School and tortured entry sequence were hated by everyone who used the facility. The architects improved this immeasurably. Give them credit for this modest accomplishment. But don’t be dazzled by shiny new surfaces and expensive technology, overlooking the obvious flaws in this ill-conceived project. Allan Kozinn has not bought the “propoganda line” that Lincoln Center is employing to sell its renovation plans. To wit, that the new architecture will create “open,” people-friendly spaces that will bring new audiences to what was once a “closed citadel” of the arts. Perhaps New Yorkers should be skeptical too.

Has Athens Lost Its Marbles?

After years of delays and much embarrassment, the new Acropolis Museum has opened in Athens, Greece. Strangely, in the years since the Athens Olympics (for which the museum was intended but couldn’t be finished on time), Greece has slipped back into a decades-old pattern of cultural and architectural underachievement. For a civilization that is still revered as the crucible of Western art and ideas, this situation is at the very least disappointing. There has been some buzz going around that the new museum would remedy the vacuum, but don’t bet on it. Bernard Tschumi has designed a building that belongs in 1960s Miami Beach, not next to the most important historic site in the world. So far the Athenians haven’t liked it much.

More significantly, the Greek government has been fighting with the English government over the return of the Elgin Marbles, which are slated to be installed in the upper gallery of Tschumi’s kitschy jewel box. Just about every commentator has an opinion on which country ought to take care of these extraordinary sculptural metopes from the frieze of the Parthenon. There is even a new book about repatriation of national art treasures from the director of the Art Institute of Chicago that weighs in on the subject. If only the great temple itself, recently restored on the Acropolis, were ready to accept these priceless antiquities, the case would be simple. Unfortunately the choices being considered include a beautiful set of rooms in the British Museum, designed by John Russell Pope, or a sterile, technocratic grid of boxes in the Tschumi museum.

On the subject of repatriation, I can only say that I do not believe that so-called “national” works of art must necessarily be displayed in the nation or place where they were originally created. While in principle the nations and regimes that paid artists to create great works ought to have first claim to them, many situations exist in which the works have taken on new meanings in new venues, or which scholarly communities have studied and protected antiquities better in far-off institutions than in those of the home country. Moreover, the global and multicultural nature of contemporary society offers numerous ways in which to view and enjoy works of art. Placing them in contexts that may be original but not safe, as in the Baghdad museum debacle, is no more acceptable than lifting them illegally from their place of origin for sale on the open market. It is interesting to observe that the countries most adamant about the return of their treasures are those with the least confidence in their own political and cultural place in the world–Peru, Greece, and Italy come to mind.

The Parthenon metopes are quintessentially architectural scupltures that should not be divorced from their place at the top of the cella inside the peristyle of the temple. In the British Museum installation they are given a simulacrum that is very close to the original spatial arrangement, in a classical room. In Athens they will be given an alien, disjunctive installation next to a wall of glass that looks out on the Acropolis, as if to say “modernity has ripped you from your mother’s breast.” From an architectural standpoint, the British have honored the sculptures, while the Greeks have besmirched their beauty and uniqueness.

The crude and brutal Tschumi design for the Acropolis Museum muddies the waters in the controversy, which is perhaps why it has thus far generated so little comment, either positive or negative. On his website, the architect calls the building an “anti-Bilbao,” as if this comparison were germane to a cultural museum on a historic site. He has little or no understanding of the context in which he builds. Demitri Porphyrios, the Greek architect most capable of producing a distinguished work of architecture in the classical mode, was not asked to compete for the commission. Both the Acropolis’s stewards and their chosen architect have failed not only their city, but the entire world in providing a compelling setting for one of the greatest art works ever created.

Do the Parthenon metopes deserve “repatriation?” Yes, in a setting that does them justice. Does Athens deserve to have them after the Tschumi debacle? No.

Renzo Piano, stealth classicist

The opening of Renzo Piano’s new Modern Art wing at the Art Institute of Chicago has won him another rave from critics throughout the U.S. Even the New York Times’s Nicolai Ouroussoff, generally a curmudgeon when it comes to Piano’s work, granted him a positive nod. His only complaint was that the country was feeling the effects of “Renzo Piano fatigue” as a result of his slew of recent commissions  in America. Why should this be the case?

Piano is a suave, cultured and disciplined designer who engenders confidence in institutional clients, both in the U.S. and abroad. His success is  hard won and, in my view, entirely deserved. While other international starchitects like Daniel Liebeskind, Rem Koohaas, and Zaha Hadid plop their trademark works in cities, expecting adulation for ignoring their local audience and trashing the urban environment, Piano carefully knits his buildings into the fabric of the places he encounters. While there is a superficial similarity to his work–most buildings are light, glassy and structurally innovative–he tries, sometimes to a fault, to find a balance between his interventions and the character of the buildings which set the stage for the new work. This is true at the Morgan Library entrance pavilion, which must attach to three disparate urban buildings (including the greatest classical building in New York–Charles McKim’s original library of 1909). It is also true of his California Academy of Science in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, a building that effortlessly includes an older Beaux Arts museum into a larger new facility while providing numerous sustainable systems that make the structure as contemporary as possible. His light, beautiful, and classical museum so outshines its clumsy Herzog & DeMeuron neighbor (the De Young) that visitors may wonder how the Swiss architects were ever considered for their commission at all.

There are moments when one architect achieves a pre-eminent position in the global marketplace, often because his work strikes a chord with stylemakers, critics and politicians. This was the case with Frank Gehry around the time of his Disney hall and Guggenheim Bilbao projects. It was surely the case when Louis Kahn unveiled his brilliant Kimball museum and Salk Center designs. Today’s master builder is Renzo Piano, an architect who has found a contemporary answer to the world’s need for a classical balance and assurance amidst chaos and uncertainty. He has made his mark quietly, largely without pandering to avant-garde critics, and the patronage network has responded with the best institutional commissions of the last decade. On balance, Piano has given us work that will outlast the flash-in-the-pan quasi-sculptures of Gehry, and perhaps rival the serene masterpieces of Kahn. That is an achievement worth celebrating, and Americans should be pleased with their good fortune and good judgment in choosing an architect of such gifts.

There goes the neighborhood

This week’s  New  York Times featured two disturbing articles that reinforce points made in earlier posts on this blogsite. Both suggest that the built environment of New York City, its wonderful urban fabric and historic neighborhoods, is not getting the attention it deserves from those who design and govern it. Santiago Calatrava’s transit hub for the World Trade Center site, years in design, has been beaten to death by bureaucrats eager to cut costs and improve anti-terrorist features. The Spanish architect works best when he is given relatively free reign, and this work shows him at his worst (as Nicolai Ouroussoff rightly points out). Give the Port Authority and the city government an “F” on this one. The WTC/Ground Zero site was the last best chance for the city to create a significant urban design with monumental features and parks. That chance is gone now.

On the other side of Manhattan, the neighborhoods that comprise an expanded South Village historic district bordering the Lower East Side, have fared no  better in the hands of the Landmark’s Preservation Commission. For two years the LPC has dragged its feet on scheduling hearings to designate the new historic district. Meanwhile, at least three of the area’s most important historic structures have either been demolished by greedy developers or renovated unsympathetically, voiding their significance. Robin Pogrebin has been following the controversy, and her story paints a depressing picture of the machinations of the one civic organization that is supposed to protect the neighborhoods of America’s greatest city. The LPC is letting the foxes in the henhouse; be afraid.

An Escape Pod by the Blobmaster

[Previous versions of this blog were incomplete]

I never cease to be amazed at the paucity of real domestic architecture that is published in the home design issues of the New York Times Magazine. Last Sunday’s issue was even more disappointing than usual, with nary a feature on what most Americans choose to call their houses–whether apartments, townhomes or single family dwellings. Pages and pages of advertising make a concerted effort to sell home products to consumers, but the writers and editors find it beneath themselves to actually acknowledge the taste of their readers. Avant-garde design continues to be their target, even when examples of this elusive animal are scarce.

Leave it to those editors, and to Nicolai Oroussoff, to pick one of the most inept examples of single family house design ever published in the Times–a small residence in California by the vaunted master of “blobitecture,” Greg Lynn. Does the house resemble the free form globules that are Lynn’s trademark? No, it is a rather boring box with a large translucent window on one end. The rooms inside and the plan suggest the work of a first-year architecture student at a small midwestern college. Lynn has, according to Ouroussoff, turned his back on building any of his work so as not to sully its purity and computerized wizardry. In his forties, the “young” architect has built nothing of consequence. Add this ineffectual building to his oeuvre.

How did Mr. Lynn, the purist, get the commission? An employee of his firm married a rich Hollywood film maker and became both the project manager and the client, a convenient arrangement. What kind of budget did he have? Almost unlimited it appears, with the added perk that the interiors would be hung with obscenely expensive contemporary art.  And the furnishings? Most are built in and made of Corian, a material that sane architects refuse to consider these days (it’s petroleum based, expensive, and mainly used as faux stone). Some pieces echo the classics of trendy mid-century modern designers–Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, and Florence Knoll.

Apparently oblivious to the irony of his commentary, Ouroussoff admits that Lynn’s little plaything is “a nice if cautious work,” “a perfect little fairy tale,” and “an exercise in good taste and high craftsmanship”–all comments that should make a design hipster want to vomit. You can hear Lynn’s student admirers running for the exits. Where is the edge, the shock value, the perversity that made Lynn a superstar for a few months in the late ’90s?

Grasping at straws, the critic and the magazine are more or less admitting that this article, and the house it puports to critique, have been “placed” by a public relations agent for the client and his architect. (Remind you of Architectural Digest during the Bush years?) Even Ouroussoff, clearly an admirer of Lynn’s work, can’t bring himself to drink the Koolaide and dole out the proper adulatory prose. The bathroom cabinetry “speaks of luxury,” the child’s  bedroom is Spielbergesque, as in “E.T. phone home.” The ultimate put-down for a shock-jock architect? “Rather than confront uncomfortable realities,” [Lynn's house] is “designed to insulate us from them.” Didn’t we just elect a president who promised to bring us back to reality after years of delusion? It now appears that “blobs and shards” were just the flip side of an architecture of escape, little different in psychological terms from their doppelgangers, the Disney-theme-park houses of those Wall Street derivative kings we’d like to tar and feather.