Gary Cooper as Howard Roark in the 1949 film version of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. (www.graymatters.gatech.edu)
Amy Freed (Portland Monthly)
Nikos Salingaros, the University of Texas mathematician and architectural philosopher whose most trenchant book is Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction, has sent me news of a new play by Amy Freed called “The Monster-Builder,” a play (on words) of Ibsen’s “The Master-Builder.” Nikos sends an interview with the playwright in Portland Monthly. Her play is being produced at the Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, Ore.
This interview is a must read. Freed really gets it. Everything she says about architects and architecture is spot on. How, as an artist, she summons the courage I have no idea. She even understands that postmodernism gave birth to the horror of modern architecture’s latest phase, now several decades long in the tooth, more so than to neo-classicism, which arguably springs also from postmodernism.
“The Monster-Builder” must be brought to Trinity Rep, in Providence. I am sure it is up to the challenge. If not, other local venues should leap in to produce a play that will rock Rhode Island to its foundation.
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About David Brussat
This blog was begun in 2009 as a feature of the Providence Journal, where I was on the editorial board and wrote a weekly column of architecture criticism for three decades. Architecture Here and There fights the style wars for classical architecture and against modern architecture, no holds barred.
History Press asked me to write and in August 2017 published my first book, "Lost Providence." I am now writing my second book.
My freelance writing on architecture and other topics addresses issues of design and culture locally and globally.
I am a member of the board of the New England chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, which bestowed an Arthur Ross Award on me in 2002.
I work from Providence, R.I., where I live with my wife Victoria, my son Billy and our cat Gato.
If you would like to employ my writing and editing to improve your work, please email me at my consultancy, dbrussat@gmail.com, or call 401.351.0457.
Testimonial: "Your work is so wonderful - you now enter my mind and write what I
would have written."
- Nikos Salingaros, mathematician at the University of Texas, architectural theorist and author of many books.
Good information. Lucky me I found your blog by accident (stumbleupon).
I’ve saved it for later!
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Great piece. i would love to see this play. you’re right, she “gets it”. Her comment, “For an architect to create a monumental experience on an urban landscape that everybody uses, the intent of which is to disorient and disturb… is the height of arrogance…” sums up my biggest complaint with the profession.
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