New national library proposed by the late Jan Kaplicky for Prague (andersonlayman.blogspot.com)

A friend, commenting on the proposed intermodal center for Queens a few posts back, said he could not imagine anything more ridiculous. I asked him whether he’d ever seen the proposal for a new Czech national library in Prague. He had not, so I sent the above to him.

The library proposal by the late Czech architect Jan Kaplicky of London was selected unanimously by the jury of an international competition in 2007. The president of Czechoslavokia, Vaclav Klaus, rallied opposition to it, but Kaplicky died and with him died his proposal. Yet many in Prague’s cultural elite backed the Kaplicky proposal (known as “Eye Above Prague”) as representing the nation’s need to continue its progress into the modern era. Opponents of the proposal were condemned as anti-democratic, even though there was nothing democratic in its selection.

The Queens proposal and the Czech library proposal both epitomize the disconnect between modern architecture and reality. These proposals are not designed to answer any public need or to reflect the nation’s culture or national sense of self, but are meant to stroke the ego of the architect, which is isolated from reality – except for the reality of modernist architectural practice, which is intended to keep reality at a certain distance.

Some readers may assume that I am making this up out of whole cloth. But in fact students of architecture are taught to treat the public’s skepticism toward their work as a feather in their cap. A book assigned in many architecture schools makes this point forthrightly. (I will insert the quote here if I can find it.) Architects are unpopular with the public not just because their work is ugly and proud of it, but because the profession has developed a reputation for browbeating its clients into accepting designs at odds with clients’ taste.

A famous episode of the TV show Wings bears this out. The clients, workers at the airport of Nantucket, just married, have been offered a free house design by a famous architect who is a frequenter of the island’s airline. He designs a house that looks like a “7” and, behind his back, the husband and wife battle over who will tell him they don’t want it.

I will try to find and post this episode.