The solar house was an entry in this year’s Decathlon, and looks much like the other entries but for the fact it had an exhibition inside on sustainability. Kudos for that. Virginia Tech ought to be giving Harvard, Yale and MIT a run for their money.
The latter work, for a historic farm site on the coast of Nova Scotia, is fascinating for its intentions but flawed in execution. Brian Mackay-Lyons is a creative Canadian architect with some familiar ideas about the rift between designers and builders. He owns a beautiful farm on the Nova Scotia coast and has turned it into a laboratory for student-architect-builder collaborations. Every summer for two weeks a group gathers to design and build a quasi-vernacular building on the farm site. Mackay spent years clearing away the detritus of modern interventions to give a better sense of how the coastline looked when traditional fishermen and farmers used the land.

Mackay-Lyons has the right idea about teaching in a craft environment and learning from vernacular builders. He has timber framers working with the teams. Unfortunately, he drank the same Kool-Aid he pretends to eschew and can’t help but inject “design” into the mix. What transpires during these workshops is great for the participants, but less useful as a long-range strategy for architecture and sustainability. There is no suggestion that building re-use or actual vernacular architecture might be the subject of one of these workshops.

Moreover, what is now on the farm site is a collection of rather self-conscious contemporary buildings that look a lot like the work of Mackay-Lyons’s firm. A comparison to Taliesin, made by the AIA jury, is very telling–Frank Lloyd Wright created a similarly self-serving “school” for his disciples in Wisconsin and Arizona more than 50 years ago. All right; architects have big egos and like to see their own ideas parroted by young designers. What’s the harm?

Well, architects trained to look at themselves as “hero-geniuses” in the mold of Wright are prone to give too much weight to the romantic idea that aesthetic merit comes solely  from the will of the artist, discounting materials, craft, history and culture. The clash between two visions of the future is not only apparent in Mr. Mackay-Lyons’s dichotomous “laboratory” but also in the buildings now sitting uneasily on the picturesque coastal site. All are intruding objects in a landscape that doesn’t require more modern objects. Less would be better, but architects must make statements, interventions, theories in stone.

How might the new building programs have been accommodated? Easily, within real vernacular buildings moved to the site and placed in a historically resonant relationship to the land and sea. Perhaps the next “ghosts” will have some real spirits inside, as only haunted houses can.

In my recent lectures and writings, I have begun to consider a startling alternative vision for the planet and its human-made environments. What if, in the name of resource and energy conservation, the most energy and waste intensive endeavor, building, was limited to the alteration, conservation and reuse of existing structures? I am not the only person to have this vision, but I suspect most other proponents are environmentalists, not architects.

Conservation of the biosphere, according to pioneers such as Ian McHarg and Aldo Leopold, must account for a “right relationship” between all human endeavors and the planet’s fragile ecosystems. If building new bridges, highways, and larger buildings consumes too much energy and generates too much waste, why not consider repairing and conserving what we already have, much as our brethren in ecology have done with existing “natural” systems? Does this sound revolutionary? If the answer is yes, avant garde architects should be pleased, because revolution has been the watchword of our “progressive” artists for more than a century.

I suspect, however, that those contemporary architects who see themselves as occupying the “cutting edge,” like the team recently assembled by Frank Gehry for his new technology lab, are heavily invested in the status quo of wasteful, energy hogging high-tech wonders. They won’t want to forego years of “research” into absurdly expensive building systems simply to answer a pressing need for real solutions to the energy crisis that might be considered “low tech” or even “no tech.” As Jens Braun put it in his Quaker blog, it may be time to look at all new construction technology as un-green, or better, time to consider low tech alternatives to what we have been building for a century or more.

Should architects abandon the search for new built form in order to address the environmental crisis? Perhaps not, but looking at this presumably extreme alternative would be refreshing, useful, and maybe even revolutionary, in the way that Kuhn’s “scientific revolution” hypothesis described paradigm shifts. I am going to stay with this idea until I run out of reasons to abandon it. Building conservation has a lot to offer the architectural profession, and architects are certainly going nowhere with the current program.

Many architects were no doubt surprised when this “outsider” was appointed to replace Nicolai Ourroussoff as the Times architecture critic. According to an AIA poll he was not among the top contenders for the job. I found the choice logical and refreshing, a necessary correction for a newspaper that had strayed from its leading position as an observer of the built environment.

Last Sunday, in one of  his first major pieces under the new byline, Kimmelman made it very clear that he would not follow the elitist, high design snobbery of his predecessor. In fact, he wrote a stirring article about the farthest thing from most avant garde architects’ minds–slums, barrios, ghettos that are home to the world’s poorest people. In a review of what must be a remarkable exhibition by the Cooper Hewitt, shown at the United Nations, this supposed aesthete was moved by the efforts of unsung designers in Bankok, Medellin, Brazil and Bangladesh to change their environment with “design.” Not with a capital D. Design as traditional, hands-on problem solving using the materials at hand.

Nothing shown in the article will thrill critical theorists in the academy. Nor will the inspiring images of an urban park, a canal boat, colorful facades on makeshift housing, and a school bus classroom find their way into Architectural Record. Kimmelman has alerted the intelligentsia to a new kind of environmental art–local building solutions that are sustainable, inexpensive, and beautiful, and that have not been touched by an Architect, with a capital A.

I am delighted to find an article about the built environment that covers the 99% rather than the 1%. Michael Kimmelman may rescue architectural criticism from the quicksand of smug, arrogant tributes to Starchitects who designed for the super-rich and cultural elites. Let us hope he succeeds.

Marvin Windows has been at the top of the premium residential market for decades, mostly due to the things that make any successful company work: quality products, good marketing, outstanding service, and sound management. Unlike the many building materials companies that fell prey to LBO scams in the 1990s, Marvin retained its family ownership–indeed, descendants of the founder are still in charge after more than a century. According to Susan Marvin, the current president, that is not about to change anytime soon.

The company has not turned a profit in three years, but won’t bend on its core values. “Unlike so many other companies, Marvin Windows has neither laid off workers nor reduced health insurance benefits. And, its executives vow, it won’t,” writes Andrew Martin from company headquarters in Warroad, Minnesota. Recognizing that its very existence as a leader in the market is threatened, this manufacturer will not downsize to reflect low demand during a lull in building. If the factory loses its core of experienced craftspersons, the company will not be able to compete once demand picks up. There is no question that Marvin fills a critical place in the U.S. building industry now, and that any reduction in its capacity will not only hurt the bottom line but also the industry as a whole. The leadership at this small company doesn’t buy Wall Street’s skewed vision for American business, and thank God for that.

If the Marvin family’s care and concern for its labor force sounds like something out of a Frank Capra movie, it may be time for American business to wake up from its cynical pipe dream and go back to work. Bravo for those ice-fishing, hockey-playing woodworkers in frigid Minnesota. Perhaps they’ll show us how good old fashioned sweat and elbow grease can lift us out of our doldrums and start building a sustainable nation for the next century and beyond.

It is perhaps too soon to tell whether the current reorganization of architectural and engineering firms has yielded more quality, less waste, and a better work environment for design professionals. Now that AECOM has risen to the top of the food chain by buying up hundreds of smaller AE firms around the world, someone should ask whether mega-firms like it and Arup are indeed providing better design and engineering service to the world at large. Big Ag put millions of farmers out of business, and has diminished the diversity of crops available to the public. Will we see fewer choices in the building industry soon?

With the current economic slump, it seems clear that only the strongest, and largest, AE firms will survive to compete in the global market. We already have giant construction companies like Bechtel, Brown and Root (under the Halliburton umbrella) and Turner dictating the terms for big projects worldwide, not to mention similar nationalized companies in China. It is only a matter of time before these AE Walmarts snuff out their competition in the largest markets.

Another, more insidious trend has entered the design marketplace through a clever and apparently benign technology–software. Building Information Modeling, which one of my students anticipated years ago in a masters thesis, has crept into the mainstream with little fanfare. Though “high design” architects pretend it isn’t an influence on their creative output, the construction industry isn’t waiting to be told whether or not to adopt a cost-saving and logistical tool that can increase profits. Like AutoCAD’s primitive Architectural Desktop, BIM reduces the assembly of building components to a standardized palette, forcing designers to exclude hand-crafted, low tech, or custom elements from their built work.

Moreover, the largest manufacturers and holding companies in the construction marketplace can now insert their products into the palette via BIM, making it too easy to accept a limited number of choices among say, glass, brick, or curtain wall brands. Soon, the kit of parts we manipulate will be reduced to a kind of fast-food menu in the supermarket of industrial and technological products controlled by an ever shrinking group of multi-national companies. Already, longstanding manufacturers like Baldwin Hardware, Morgan Millwork, and several lighting brands have been acquired by such rapacious giants. The result: less service, poorer quality, longer lead times.

We’ve grown fat and lazy on plastic, fast food produced in giant industrial plants, taking little notice of the harmful effects on our bodies. Modern technology made such miracles possible. It’s time we woke up and looked around at what this system is doing to the built environment too.

Baird, who ran the school of architecture at the University of Toronto, has attended his fair share of academic conferences. That he chose 2011 to comment on two recent “sustainability” themed ones seems prescient to me. He notes that many “younger” architects are starting to doubt the efficacy of high tech buildings that claim LEED silver or platinum status. He also notes the emergence of architects who are actually following up on performance claims made for such buildings, often documenting their near of complete failure to measure up. “It is clear that we will need to redouble our future efforts in three important ways: first, to ensure successful fulfillment of technically based environmental ambitions for our buildings; second, to be more rigorous with regard to our predictions of performance — especially parameters of performance that are only partly within our own professional control,” he concluded.

More disturbing than the unsubstantiated claims, however, is the fact that our most recognized high-tech “green” buildings are now under fire from the government and clients, sometimes in the form of lawsuits. Baird noted that the first LEED platinum building in the US has never met its projected performance targets, and that the architects are being sued over the failure of its wooden structure, an odd exoskeleton of timbers [Philip Merrill Environmental Center in Annapolis, Maryland, designed by SmithGroup (2000)].

In the same issue of the magazine, a critic for the San Francisco Chronicle took a second look at Thom Mayne’s iconic San Francisco Federal Building, with commentary scarcely less scathing. He notes that the shading system is on the fritz, the cafe can’t attract patrons, and the main public space is so dreary most Social Security customers feel as though they’re in a prison. John King still feels that his city benefits from the architectural tourism that the building brings in, but he’s scratching his head about the much heralded green technology that makes it [not] work.

Architects are facing a barrage of challenges to their credibility in 2011. The last thing we need is criticism about our concern for the environment.

As I’ve said before in this blog, the CCTV Tower is a death trap that will make the Towering Inferno look like a walk in the park should it ever catch fire (as it almost did a few years ago). Thousands of Chinese will risk life and limb working in the building, and will no doubt vacate it before a decade is up. It is also one of the most menacing, mute, and insipid buildings ever designed. How Koolhaas is able to pass it off as a seminal work of architecture is worth considering, because it says a lot about the pitiable state of the design professions now.

Koolhaas is one of the most insidious and chimerical propagandists ever to claim eminence as an architect, and such a list would include Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Peter Eisenman, to name just 20th century figures. Virtually all of his notoriety comes from self aggrandizing, polemical books and articles such as Delirious New York, and S/M/L/XL, his fashion parody treatise of a few years back. One building in the U.S., the Seattle Public Library, got kudos for the architect from many critics. Otherwise his firm has worked mainly in Europe on odd, mainly cultural, or retail buildings. He likes shopping. His books are bland attempts at humor in the vein of South Park.

Like many a 20th century art figure, Koolhaas makes his living as an antagonist of the status quo, though he sometimes pretends to defend aspects of the contemporary city that others find banal and negative. His cynicism is a sign for hip disengagement with all that might be considered normative. Like many charlatan-artists, he often writes or talks in syllogisms. Circular reasoning frees him from every having to claim an idea or defend one. He often offers his buildings as snide, critical jokes on their users or patrons.

The CCTV Tower is just such a building. He has written that people “can inhabit anything” now, and this frees him to create buildings that challenge users to find comfort, security or aesthetic pleasure in their spaces. None of those qualities are present in the CCTV Tower. In fact, the building fairly dares its inhabitants to figure out how to enter, circulate, or locate their work spaces in it. The public are forced to follow a prescribed, snakelike route that skirts the common work spaces that give the building its name.

Like many insecure polemicists, Koolhaas has to reinforce the importance of his work in ways that real innovators find distasteful. Presenting his building as a reinvention of the skyscraper (a type he has swooned over for decades), he felt the need to patent the design (a deliberate reference to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mile High Illinois).  He has also written that the surfeit of published images of the project, many in realistic photo-montage, provide a “commentary” on representation, virtual reality, and advertising. It is the latter that he cynically employs in “branding” CCTV as an OMA work. Suggesting that everything he publishes is a “meta” version of something else also smacks of smug circularity. He even pokes fun at the Chinese, his dumbfounded patrons, for spending billions on buildings like his own to build cultural capital during the Beijing Olympics.

A skilled manipulator of the media, Koolhaas has “built” his CCTV Tower on a rhetoric of sand. Inserting a bomb into the very society he clearly despises, his building is a kind of Trojan Horse. Full of hidden contradictions, dangerous hazards and armies of automatons who work for the state while also trumpeting the architect’s subversive ideas, the CCTV is an anti-tower without portfolio. It reminds me of Madelon Vriesendorp’s phallic paintings of the Chrysler and Empire State building in post-coital exhaustion, featured in Delirious New York. Soon someone, maybe me, will paint a version of the Beijing “tower” as a similarly flaccid, twisted lover, disappointed that it couldn’t remain erect long enough to reach climax.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen, a former Harvard professor and now critic for the The New Republic, misinterprets the malaise that has stifled creative urban design in cities like New York and Boston during the post-Reagan era. Like the polemical Rem Koolhaas, Dr. Goldhagen sees “nostalgia” as a sort of opiate, “a recipe for insipidity and urban incoherence.” Her Op-Ed piece in The New York Times on June 11 makes some excellent points about the ineffectual planning policies that have created the mess we have today, but her criticisms of historic preservation deflect the blame for these policies from government and developers who were often complicit in creating banality and chaos in our best cities.

Because preservationists have become the most active advocates for neighborhoods and urban vitality, we have taken the brunt of criticism for the inevitable gentrification that has occurred since Reagan opened the floodgates of laissez faire capitalism. If one skims the surface of history, as Koolhaas and Goldhagen have done, it is easy to render such misplaced judgments. Goldhagen thinks that our movement began during the 1960s, after Grand Central Station, but she hasn’t done her homework. Instead of the “blue haired ladies in tennis shoes” from the DAR and Colonial Dames, we should thank the citizens of New Orleans and Charleston during the New Deal for saving some of our best historic districts. All preservationists are not political conservatives; indeed, the most effective have been progressive liberals like Nellie Longsworth, Jim Fitch  and Richard Moe.

It is time for intelligent urbanists to stop painting historic preservation as an agent of the capitalist elite. To be sure, early efforts to save Founding Fathers’ houses were often spearheaded by the upper crust, but since the 1960s the movement has, in the main, been a people’s effort sustained by small-scale, grass roots initiatives. If educated critics are to understand what is happening today, they should read the work of Ned Kaufman, Dan Bluestone, and yes, yours truly. We all taught in Columbia’s Historic Preservation program in the mid-1980s, and our students are now leading the movement toward greater pluralism and sustainable practices. Don’t make us out to be our grandparents; we are moving on.

What, we were asked to consider, was the relevance of an architect who worked in a small Italian town during the Renaissance to the complex, troubled world we inhabit in 2011? Armed with fresh research and facts gleaned from a study of 31 drawings by the master, the lecturers found numerous lessons and parallels linking the Vicentine architect to present day challenges.

Palladio was an urbanist who championed “civitas” or civic virtue among the citizens of Venice, a quality much to be desired in urban leaders today. He offered lessons to architectural educators about the skills and responsibilities necessary for the revival of our troubled profession. His famous treatise, the Four Books of Architecture, remains a model of architectural theory and scholarship, as we learn more about how it was conceived, planned and produced in 1570. Most important, his extraordinary buildings continue to enthrall and stimulate people from all over the world, no matter how their cultural biases and interpretations color their experience.

How “modern” is Palladio? In the broad sense, Palladio was one of history’s first modern architects because he worked during the beginning of the “long” period of modernization which had its end late in the last century. More importantly, this true Renaissance man worked within the universal tradition of classicism, still the most versatile and vital cultural canon in the West, and one that is increasingly relevant in an age of globalization. Where are the most recent Palladian buildings and urban projects being designed and constructed? In China, India and South America, of course.

Neither he, nor his apologist Nicolai Ourroussoff of the New York Times, seems to be aware of the increasing threats to some of the world’s most precious historic structures, now that wars are raging throughout the Middle East and climate disasters are leveling whole cities in Asia. The Mostar Bridge will be a mere footnote when historians consider the toll taken by these new ethnic conflicts. Nor do they acknowledge the fact that the preservation movement has been, in Stewart Brand’s estimation, the only popular architectural movement to garner virtually unanimous praise from governments, civic leaders and concerned citizens everywhere. Perhaps that is why avant garde architects find it so threatening.

Koolhaas has invented a cute epithet, “Cronocaos,” to denigrate all preservation by painting landmarking efforts as elitist, nostalgic, and falsely engaged with “history.” Despite the unquestionable alienation brought on by Modernist planning, urban renewal, and the high rise megacities that he favors, he dares to suggest that saving great buildings and districts “further alienates us from the past.” What kind of past is he talking about? And what kind of history? The most likely answer is that Koolhaas continues to hold to discredited and destructive views of the zeitgeist and Hegelian historicism that are no longer taken seriously by any respected historian. His view of “reality” is as distorted as any supposed theme park operator might conjure.

Ourroussoff writes that “the show [at a chic downtown gallery] draws on ideas that have been floating around architectural circles for several years now–particularly the view among many academics that preservation movements around the world, working hand in hand with governments and developers, have become a force for social gentrification and social displacement, driving out the poor to make room for wealthy homeowners and tourists.” Where does he find the “academics” that  hold these views? And what publications can he cite in which they are articulated with proven scholarship? As a professor of historic preservation at four leading universities, I have seen nothing of the kind among respected academics in any field. Moreover, to suggest with nothing but hearsay evidence that all preservation results in social displacement is insulting millions of neighborhood residents who have remained in their homes because of landmarking efforts that stave off development and sprawl. This kind of rhetoric fans the flames of conflict and gives developers the green light to destroy more cities and landscapes with monstrous buildings like those Koolhaas has designed in Beijing.

I am surprised that the New York Times found Ourroussoff’s “critique” of this exhibition “fit to print,” for it is the worst kind of journalistic pandering to garner favor with a cultural figure whom the critic admires. There is virtually no mention of a counter argument or suggestion that people of intelligence might strongly disagree with the positions presented. One might as well read the texts presented in the exhibition or its catalog with no analysis whatsoever. The public deserves better from one of the few critics who are actually paid to cover critical issues in architecture and urbanism. NPR actually had an engineer who could discuss the effects of tornadoes on buildings, something that many people might find useful when facing death or injury in a storm. Ourroussoff is worried that his favorite bars in the Bowery might be displaced by “gentrification.” Put him on the next plane to Joplin, Missouri and he’ll see what real worries are about.