Is terra-cotta rising again?

Posted on April 17, 2017 by David Brussat

Screen Shot 2017-04-17 at 2.40.14 PM.png

Architect magazine has an article called “The Rise, Fall and Rise of Archi- tectural Terra-Cotta” that seems to have come out of nowhere. No, it was sent me by Kristen Richards, of the indispensable ArchNewsNow.com; what I mean is that there seems no rhyme nor reason to such an article’s existence in the mouthpiece of the American Institute of Architects. I may well exag- gerate its loathing for new traditional architecture, but the journal’s prefer- ence for modern architecture is beyond indisputable. After all, the article on terra-cotta is part of a monthly series called “Throw-Back Thursdays.”

But is there a “rise” of terra-cotta afoot? I hope so. The article’s author, Mike Jackson, writes, “While architectural terra-cotta largely disappeared by the mid-20th century, there is now an active market for terra-cotta restoration products to maintain the legacy of landmark terra-cotta buildings.” He has nothing to say, it seems, about the usefulness of terra-cotta in constructing new traditional buildings. And yet most of the New Jersey Terra Cotta Co. pamphlet from which Jackson draws his article’s illustrations is devoted to terra-cotta used as wall construction systems for new buildings. Maybe members of the TradArch list who read this can comment on whether terra-cotta is on the way back.

Either way, backward-looking though it may be, and assuming its editors are not rolling their eyes in dismay that they must put this sort of thing on their pages, Architect merits applause for running the piece. It is accompanied by some very interesting commercial promotions from the archives of the Building Technology Heritage Library, a project of the Association for Preservation Technology. Definitely worth a look.

Gary Brewer, a partner at Robert A.M. Stern Architects, writes of the firm Roman and Williams, leaders in the “slow design” movement specializing in craft interiors, but also branching out into whole buildings:

Roman and Williams’s Fitzroy apartment building which is under construction in the Meatpacking District is clad in terra cotta.  I was invited to their developer’s launch party at the Boom Boom Room (which R&W designed in the Standard Hotel) and if the crowd was any indication terra cotta could join the palette of materials of the hip set once the building is complete.  Building materials are not immune to the shifts of fashion.

Screen Shot 2017-04-17 at 2.39.23 PM.png

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

If dentists were modernists

Posted on April 15, 2017 by David Brussat

Screen Shot 2017-04-15 at 1.42.27 PM.png

Jan Michl, whose paper on architectural historicism I discussed yesterday in “Pop the ‘historicist’ bugaboo,” wrote another paper, “Form Follows What?,” which he introduced with a riff from Woody Allen. Naturally, I encourage readers to read the whole paper, but get a load of this!

A letter received by Theo van Gogh from his dentist brother Vincent:

Dear Theo: Will life ever treat me decently? I am wracked by despair! My head is pounding! Mrs. Sol Schwimmer is suing me because I made her bridge as I felt it and not to fit her ridiculous mouth! That’s right! I can’t work to order like a common tradesman! I decided her bridge should be enormous and billowing, with wild, explosive teeth flaring up in every direction like fire! Now she is upset because it won’t fit in her mouth! She is so bourgeois and stupid, I want to smash her! I tried forcing the false plate in but it sticks out like a star-burst chandelier. Still, I find it beautiful. She claims she can’t chew! What do I care whether she can chew or not! Theo, I can’t go on like this much longer … Vincent

This is from “If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists,” a piece Allen wrote in 1978. In ten letters from van Gogh to his brother, Theo hears about the dental practices of other famous Impressionist painters. Beyond hilarious!

The cartoon, of course, is by Gary Larson.

Posted in Architecture, Humor | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Pop the ‘historicist’ bugaboo

Posted on April 14, 2017 by David Brussat

karlovyvary.png

Jan Michl: “If the task was to design a new public square in a small town, the modernists, equipped only with their abstract, minimalist visual vocabulary, would have no chance of creating a common space with such unassuming, pleasant qualities as this one [Karlovy Vary, town in the Czech Republic].”

Jan Michl, the design theorist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, saw my post “Huxtable versus Huxtable” and sent me a recent paper called “Towards Understanding Visual Styles as Inventions Without Expiration Dates.” In it, he argues that the late British philosopher Karl Popper had come up with an alternative to Huxtable’s “historicism.”

According to Huxtable and most architectural historians, architectural history advances no further than modern architecture, where it reaches nirvana. That sounds arrogant, but yes, they do actually believe that all prior architectural styles are inappropriate to build in modernity because they reflect the past, not today. That is the “expiration date” to which Michl refers in his title. This attitude architects call “historicism.” (They use the same word to criticize building designs inspired by historic architecture.)

As is often the case, however, the average man on the street sees things much more clearly, intuitively and naturally. Most folks do not discriminate against building styles based on when they were invented. They accept architecture of every type openly and judge it based not on when it was invented but on whether they like it. Michl writes:

[T]he common-sense feeling here ascribed to the public, that art of the past is a natural part of the modern present, has been seldom clearly articulated. … It has been incomparably more prestigious to side with the modernist cause and applaud the “avant-garde” positions than to espouse the perspective of the “philistine” public.

Modern architecture, according to historicism, is based on the idea that the course of history is set, and that with modernism, architectural history has arrived at its logical, rational, scientific conclusion. Traditional architecture, old or new, stands in the way of the new order by evoking sentiments that connect individuals to the past, causing them to resist new buildings that may or may not reflect our time but which definitely lack familiarity.

That is historicism in a nutshell. If it sounds vaguely Marxist, “vague” is the wrong word. It is, say Popper and Michl, directly influenced by Marx, who put a stopping point – socialism, the goal of communist government – on Hegel’s dialectical analysis of time and progress. The idea that human will and individual action can affect the course of history is traditional architecture’s original sin.

It is no accident (as Marx would say) that futuristic films featuring authoritarian governments that try to stifle free will almost always also feature settings of modern architecture. Look at Fahrenheit 451 or Blade Runner. In the Star Wars series, the bad guys live in places like the Death Star, while the good guys (that is, the oppressed) on various planets live in different sorts traditional villages, towns or cities. Are the directors of these films (such as George Lucas) aware of the philosophical debate that plays out in the sets they create for their films? I suspect not.

Popper sets up an ontological triad consisting of the physical world, the mental world, and the world of ideas for things created over time in the mental world. It is the latter entity, which Popper called “World 3,” that supplants historicism. World 3, or objective knowledge, is a “cultural commons” that enables each human to freely borrow from all of man’s past creativity. This, Michl writes,

represents a truly bold attempt to conceptualize a fact known or at least suspected by every productive person. Namely, that our human creativity is anchored in, and incessantly draws upon, a realm outside the individual creator’s head. … I submit that it implies a powerful alternative to the governing modernists’ “time-keeping” [historicism], and simultaneously a more realistic view of the nature of creativity in the field of architecture and design.

He adds later:

[I]t is neither something eternal nor divine, but entirely man-made, just as birds’ nests and spiders’ webs are created by birds and spiders. … Had Popper been still alive and active today, he would have probably resorted to up-to-date analogies in order to make the concept of World 3 more widely understandable, such as, for example, “World Wide Web,” “Public Domain,” “Open Source,” or “Creative Commons.” Creative Commons in particular might serve as an accessible synonym for Popper’s World 3.

Of the use of locutions such as “historicist,” “pastiche,” “faux,” and “not of our time” by architects trying to solve design problems, he writes:

[T]here can be many reasons for finding a formal solution objectionable, but not the one that points out that it hails from a past epoch – which is what the modernist critical arguments against contemporary non-modernist stylistic idioms invariably boil down to. As already suggested, such branding makes sense only when one subscribes to the [historicist] belief that there is an intrinsically correct aesthetic expression pertaining to the modern period and that this correctness can be discovered only by designers and architects who have turned their back on the past.

The awkwardness of architectural periods that architectural historians have managed to talk around so adeptly is that most historical buildings of whatever “period” have more characteristics in common than not. That is because they all evolve to a greater or lesser degree from Greco-Roman classicism, which is a reflection of both nature and human nature. The traditional idiom, or language, evolved for centuries, honing refinements to building practice. Then modern architecture tried to throw it onto the ash heap of history and replace it with an experiment that rejects precedent. Imagine that! The degree of their success, given the poverty of their basic idea, is astonishing. But given modernism’s inability to develop its own coherent architectural language despite the passage of a century, there is ever more reason to hope today that modernism will be forced to relinquish its hold on architectural authority.

Modern architecture suffered epic fail more than half a century ago, a truth evident to all outside the cocoon of modernism. That is why historic preservation went from being a niche hobby to a mass movement in the snap of a finger after 1960. Jan Michl’s revival of Karl Popper’s thoughts on the invalidity of a central mantra of the modernist cult will be an invaluable tool for readmitting beauty and other shunned qualities to architecture.

My effort to sum up these important ideas should be reinforced by reading Michl’s elegant, evocative and persuasive paper, which is here. A page sent by Audun Engh linking to 30 other papers on architecture, design and education in those fields is here.

Screen Shot 2017-04-14 at 5.55.03 PM.png

“The Bridge” (1976), by Jan Soucek. Michl: “In the [historicist] view of the modernist architects, the past and the present are seen as two separate worlds, and tht is why they ought not to be connected in any manner. Soucek deemed such a conviction preposterous.”

Posted in Architecture, Architecture Education | Tagged , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

London then and now

Posted on April 13, 2017 by David Brussat
Screen Shot 2017-04-13 at 7.51.02 PM.png

Piccadilly Circus in 2015 and 1896. (Yestervid)

This video, “Oldest Footage of London Ever,” from Yestervid, one-ups its own videos of old footage of New York posted here a few days ago by including not only the old footage but also side-by-side old and new footage – not stills – of the city, mostly from the early 1900s but as far back as 1890. The helpful maps are there, too. Again, observers nowadays must be mindful that people a century ago saw the “now” clips we see today in crisp living color in equally crisp living color, not the somewhat jumpy, grainy, smudgy, black & white “then” clips on this video. Fascinating nevertheless, especially the people walking along the streets and the horse taxis. “Hop aboard, Holmes! Where to?” How Londoners on foot negotiated the melee of street traffic a century ago defies the imagination.

Posted in Old Video | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Words that protect a nude

Posted on April 11, 2017 by David Brussat
Screen Shot 2017-04-11 at 11.41.46 AM.png

“A Roman Slave Market” (1884), by Jean-Leon Gerome. (Pinterest)

The essay that accompanies the girl being sold at a Roman slave market in the 1884 painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) tries to cover up the nude with protective words. The writer, Titus Techera, performs an act of charity in his description of the slave girl, her audience who want to buy her, and their relationships with the artist and his own audience (we might add the writer and his audience as well). Techera admits the salaciousness of the painting, distracting us from it and minimizing its leverage over our feelings and, perhaps, helping the girl to feel less exposed. I won’t try to describe the whole essay – better to read it (on the website Ricochet). It is much more straitforward than most examples of art criticism. But here is a passage:

We are the audience of this painting and the scene that attracts our attention has an audience of its own. We are shown the back of a denuded slave girl, as well as her discarded robe, whereas they are shown the frontal view. This may seem like a crazy suggestion, but we need each other to make a whole of our two partial perspectives. The painter, like any of us, knows we have a power in our soul to make wholes of the fleeting, partial things we see. We know what girls look like and this image-making power of the soul would supply what is missing, that we may recognize from an inevitably partial perspective the whole that is a being. That power is our first inner critic, so to speak, letting us know what we see when we look around, and whether the painter has given us an adequate image of that which we know within ourselves.

Gérôme was part of the Academic school of painting in Paris and was among those favored artists challenged by the Impressionists, who held a counter- salon to protest their exclusion from the art establishment. Although the Impressionists did lovely work, the schools of art that followed them lacked not just beauty but the ability to engage an audience with subtle social and psychological commentary on the full range of subjects of interest to society. With the later modernist schools, art became fascinated by itself and itself alone. In what amounted to a hissy fit against realism, art basically threw its own greatest tools into the trash heap. Titus Techera has a good idea of what has been lost. The world of music suffered likewise. Both closely parallel what was lost when architecture threw out the tools of its art.

Posted in Architecture, Art and design | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Huxtable versus Huxtable

Posted on April 10, 2017 by David Brussat
Screen Shot 2017-04-10 at 5.44.32 PM.png

Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in Harlem, New York. (Susan Portnoy/The Insatiable Traveler)

Ada Louise Huxtable’s first collection of her New York Times criticism, Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?, is subtitled “A Primer on Urbicide.” The widely admired book, first published in 1970, is less than the sum of its parts. It contradicts itself page by page, often sentence by sentence. Its failure to re- cognize the nature of the crisis of cities is total. Her columns pit her support for modern architecture against her support for historic preservation. The latter makes no sense in light of the former. Preservation is necessary only because of the threat to cities posed by modernism. Each old building pre- served is a job robbed from a modern architect. They are natural enemies.

Screen Shot 2017-04-10 at 5.21.22 PM.png

(Wikipedia)

But for decades, in part because of the influence of Huxtable’s writing, preservationists have been in bed with the modernists, who have persuaded them to play down their original purpose of saving historic buildings in favor of modernist interventions in historic districts and saving mid-century modern architecture. Huxtable, who died in 2013, has been a primary source of the sort of thinking that nowadays makes it hard for preservationists to support efforts to strengthen the setting of preserved buildings, in part by supporting new buildings today that would have inspired preservation efforts yesterday.

The ham-handed slabs she prefers will never spark a preservation movement.

Huxtable’s columns were published weekly on Sundays in the Real Estate section between 1963 and 1982. In later years she wrote for the Wall Street Journal. As I said in a post on April 1, “The Huxtable joke’s on us,” she ima- gined herself a thorn in the side of the architectural establishment when in fact she was its tribune. She fell hook, line and sinker for the full modernist credo: that modern architecture expresses our times, and that any other type of architecture is obsolete because it is part of history, and therefore not part of the present or the future. Her fiercest barbs were aimed at new architec- ture that compromised with the past or, worse, was inspired by the past.

It’s hard to pluck one quote that epitomizes this attitude, but the following passage from her Dec. 4, 1966, column “Of Symbolism and Flying Saucers” will do. It is about the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York’s Morningside Heights. Begun in 1891 and, with a shift in style from Romanesque to Gothic two decades later, it remains incomplete.

The misconceptions of its builders are reflected accurately in the vicessitudes of its construction. When a church evolved from Romanesque to Gothic from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, art and history, not a board of trustees, made the decision. When St. John the Divine was redesigned from Roman- esque to Gothic, Ralph Adams Cram, the Gothic revivalist who replaced the original firm of Heins and La Farge in 1911, opted for the change, and it really didn’t matter. It was not important because neither style grew out of the conditions of the time. …

Out of context, the formula is not reproducible. The same moment and the same results never come twice. Archaeological copying will not make it so. This is an ineluctable reality of art and life. Until it is understood, we will continue to have the pious repro- ductions, the dead reconstructions, the vacuum-packed imitations and the false, nostalgic standards that, at best, evoke only the second-hand suggestion of the artistic glories of some other age, or at worst, throttle creativity and subvert values in our own.

Here Huxtable clings, as always, to her “of our time” mantra. If any of it were valid in the least, then all architecture prior to modern architecture would be illegitimate, because all architecture that predates modernism was based on adherence to precedent. The architects of St. John the Divine were copying only to the extent that they were inspired by earlier work. The client/trustee changed his mind for reasons of fashion (Huxtable assures us) in 1911, but that did not invalidate the work done before or since. There is no specific church they are seeking to replicate stone by stone. Their meticulous labor well reflects the sort of meticulous labor of the pre-Renaissance cathedral builders. Huxtable’s framing of this process as lacking in creativity is a form of dishonesty. Her own writing has made “copying the past” a sort of sin in which specificity falsely stands in for generality. (Almost no new buildings literally copy old buildings.) Her assurance that the new cathedral could not reflect its time assumes that every age is a unitary event; no, it is a collection of a million complexities, most of which flow from the years before. She might have a point if she were decrying work done poorly rather than well, but she was not. She was decrying the use of precedent in art. In short, she was a fool. Hers was a mistake of profound misunderstanding – if she actually believed her own nonsense.

Huxtable makes her errors again and again because she buys into a fiction created by architectural historians covering up for the errors at the root of modern architecture. Historical buildings are pigeon-holed into styles ap- propriate to specific periods based on their differences from styles before and after. However, architectural history is much more a continuum of stylistic change, punctuated by revivals, not a series of more or less discrete jumps from one period to the next, reflecting some sharp turn in the character of a period of time, from which each style allegedly springs. Historians struggle to understand historic periods with the tools of language, thought and hind- sight – architects working in mute materials can hardly be expected to speak with any genuine coherence. Throughout the entire string of architectural periods, old buildings are much more alike than different. That is why his- toric buildings of diverse styles fit so well together on a street. Only since the advent of modern architecture has fitting in been a problem.

Most old buildings spring from the Greco-Roman classical orders (or their predecessors in Egypt and elsewhere). Some adhere rigidly and others loosely, often very loosely, to those ancient precepts. Change came slowly, with successive generations of builders, craftsmen and architects adopting the best practices and technologies to bring measured change that fulfilled the needs of humans and societies far more usefully and creatively than the revolutionary change of modern architecture. Traditional architecture and urbanism grow organically, a process that mirrors nature itself.

In so doing, old buildings reflect time with far more veracity than either modernism – which abhors precedent (or at least pretends to) – or the fraudulent stylistic periods invented by architectural historians and em- braced by Huxtable and her camp followers. This is obvious in any honest and intelligent reading of her collection of columns.

Even her writing isn’t what it’s cracked up to be: her style is often fuddled, no doubt because her ideas lack the cogency required to explicate with clarity. Her prose is not witty but a long sneer at people with whom she disagrees, including the public, for which she has no respect. It is enough for her that modernists may be relied upon to snicker into their sleeves. And yet Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard should be required reading for every architect interested in correcting the deep and tragic mistakes in the building arts of the past half century and more. Know thine enemy!

A few more photos of St. John the Divine are below, to counteract the slan- der of the critic.

Screen Shot 2017-04-10 at 8.26.10 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-04-10 at 5.45.26 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-04-10 at 5.46.16 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-04-09 at 4.11.20 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-04-09 at 4.07.56 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-04-09 at 4.09.10 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-04-09 at 4.10.05 PM.png

Posted in Architecture, Books and Culture | Tagged , , , , , | 8 Comments

New York then and now

Posted on April 9, 2017 by David Brussat
Screen Shot 2017-04-08 at 8.38.03 PM.png

Broad Street looking toward the New York Stock Exchange. (Cora Drimus)

Yesterday I posted a series of film clips shot between 1896 and 1905, and urged readers familiar with the city to use the tools supplied with the video to imagine what those places look like today. Well, a reader, Barry Schiller, found a video in the YouTube list next to the one I had posted, titled “Once Upon a Time in New York,” that does just that – a video that places still shots of the same place and the same angle from the past and the present next to each other. You don’t have to know the city intimately to see what time has wrought. Some of the shots force us to recast our assumption (mine, at any rate) that New York has gotten uglier. That feeling might give rise to an internal debate on the influence of black & white versus color on one’s assessment of the relative allure of any given pair of shots. Whatever your conclusion, the juxtapositions are fascinating.

The new photos were taken by Cora Drimus in April of 2014, who conceived the idea for this video and edited it. The old photos come from a variety of sources, including shorpy.com, Facebook.com/OldNewYorkImages, and two books, both called New York Then and Now, by E.B. Watson and E.V. Gillon and by M. Reiss and E. Joseph, respectively.

Screen Shot 2017-04-08 at 8.37.04 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-04-08 at 8.38.53 PM.png

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Oldest footage of New York

Posted on April 8, 2017 by David Brussat
Screen Shot 2017-04-08 at 5.26.52 PM.png

New York’s Herald Square on May 11, 1896. (Library of Congress/Yestervid)

This fascinating video, “Oldest footage of New York City ever,” filmed between 1896 and 1905, has been seen on this blog before. I post it again because, first, it is so amazing, and second, it has a new feature my first post of this lacked: a strip with maps of where the scene being shown was shot and in what direction the camera was pointing.

The scenes are spliced so as to lead the viewer backward in time. What the producers think most people will be most interested in seeing comes last. I would have flipped the sequencing so that some sense of moving forward in time is retained. But there is so much going on in the streets and sidewalks that the order doesn’t really matter. There is a host of personal incidents that take place which many will want to view again and again. For those familiar with the city today, you can pause and use the maps and arrows to orient in your mind the view back then as it looks today.

Look for these highlights: a copper in one of those bulbous helmets twirling his nightstick as he walks his Lower East Side beat; a man strolling by the Flatiron Building whose hat flies off in the wind; a boat sailing by, in 1903, the approximate site of the WTC, with the Twin Towers etched in (this is where I figured the video would end); horse-drawn carriages driving down Broadway in 1902, already lined with tall buildings; a woman walking along West 23rd near Fifth Avenue with her beau when a whoosh of air from a subway grate lifts her dress – her smile, priceless – the cameraman obviously set up to catch this, half a century before Monroe; a time-lapse demo of the Star Theater; Buffalo Bill on parade down Fifth Avenue; a skating pratfall in Central Park; in 1899, a fist- fight in Madison Square, perhaps between newsboys; the oldest footage of a busy Herald Square intersection; and of course so many old buildings, some identified on the clips, that survive 112 to 121 years after being filmed.

(The video was produced by Yestervid in 2014 with Library of Congress clips.)

Posted in Architecture, Old Video | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Classicism’s relevance today

Posted on April 7, 2017 by David Brussat

Screen Shot 2017-04-06 at 6.43.16 PM.png

The Boston Design Center in the city’s Innovation District hosted a panel today, as part of Boston Design Week, on the relevance of classicism in contemporary design. All five panelists agreed that yes, classicism is still relevant. Classicism has a job of healing to do today after half a century with its opposite, modernism, at the controls. Right outside the windows was all the evidence you needed: the Innovation District itself, described by one panelist as the opposite of a humanistic environment.

Unfortunately, the Innovation District isn’t the only evidence. We are sur- rounded by the evidence, outside and inside, and around the world. It is killing us. Classicism is the antidote.

The discussion was put on by the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art‘s New England chapter, whose president, David Andreozzi, opened the session and handed it off to its moderator, chapter member Eric Daum, an architect at Merrimack Design. He set the stage for the discussion with a rousing general description of classicism. He said the Roman architect Vitruvius defined its requirements as firmitas, utilitas and venustas – strength, use- fulness and delight. Modernism, he added, holds that strength and use- fulness are enough. Modernists “removed the human from design, and with it the belief that beauty mattered.” He concluded by asserting that classicists

believe that beauty is an essential part of architecture; that beauty is not subjective, but objective, as described by Vitruvius and refined through more than 2,000 years of Western tradition. We believe that people have a positive visceral response to classical design. Because beauty is desirable, it has a positive impact upon property value. But most importantly, beauty and tradition, through a rigorous authentic classicism, connect us to the flow of history, both to our past, but hopefully to future generations through the legacy of the built world we leave behind.

The next speaker, John Tittmann of the firm Albert, Righter and Tittmann and a former board member of the chapter, described how architecture might be said to represent the way a building and its neighbors create a block, blocks combine to form a neighborhood, and neighborhoods con- stitute the major parts of a city. This is the organic flow of a city, a history that fits into the broadest of nature’s schemes – the circadian rhythm of day and night, to which the city must conform. The grid of the hours of man’s activity as an urban creature forms the framework within which cities succeed or fail. When they succeed, their street networks look just like the chlorophilic skeleton of a leaf. Hence their sustainability over time.

Leslie-jon Vickory, the education committee chairwoman of the chapter’s board and an interior design architect at Hamady Architects, picked up the thread. She described how in her work she turns the influence of day and night into the architecture of inside and out. Along the shift from light to dark to light again, the art of interior design is deployed. Her diaphanous sketches of interiors help a client to ponder the character of a room in a house, and to move his or her mind’s eye through what Vickory described as “the place between reality and imagination.”

The next speaker, woodworker Oliver Bouchier, partner in the craft shop of Payne-Bouchier and a former chapter board member, reached backward to establish an even more sensual connection with “the pleasure and satisfac- tion of making prehistoric artifacts.” Ratcheting up from the hewing of rude stone edges, stone spear heads, polished jade and the earliest architecture, such as Stonehenge, Bouchier illustrated the ancient progress of craftsman- ship. That movement over time, he said, was accompanied by an ever more powerful and sophisticated sensuality in decorative creation. The joy of craft, Bouchier seemed to suggest, cannot be reconciled on any level with the ab- sence of feeling, soul and humanity that has overtaken the degenerative machine sterility of architecture in our time.

Finally came architect Ann Sussman, author (with Justin Hollander) of Cognitive Architecture, batting cleanup. Her research, using eye-tracking and other software to measure the neurophysiological response of the mind to pictures of our built environment, demonstrates that humans prefer active surfaces to blank surfaces. This turns out to be the main reason why people generally desire traditional, not modern, architecture. We are hard-wired to dread the stripped-down absence of articulation that characterizes most of modernism. Starting with what we know about mental illness and working back from her neuropsychological evidence, Sussman exposed the flaws in modern architecture’s founding mythology. All three of modernism’s main early pioneers, the Swiss/French Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (“Le Corbusier”) and Germans Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, suffered from mental illness. Gropius and Mies saw action in World War I and emerged with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), while Corbusier was autistic.

Modernism’s original ban on ornament was based in part on a perceived need to break from past practices in architecture after the horrors of World War I. Whatever the merit of that justification, Sussman argued, the new style offended the residual desire for detail that arose from early mankind’s dire need for information about his surroundings. This survival mechanism evolved over millennia into today’s deep preference for ornament, the sort of embellishment purged from modern architecture. The brain’s clearest mani- festation of this need and its strongest tendency of all is to seek out facial imagery, very much including the symbolic faces that turn up in the place- ment of windows and doors in the façades of traditional buildings – faces that are rare in the blank walls of so much modernism.

The presentations ended and questions from the audience were invited. As when Sussman spoke to the chapter on Feb. 23 – reported in my post “Suss- man on Corbu’s autism” – an audience member wondered whether she is arguing that all modernist architects are mentally ill. Sussman replied that the idea was not that every modernist was mentally ill but that modernist architecture displays the unfortunate characteristics of mental illness baked into the architectural principles developed by its founders and maintained, cult-like (my characterization, not Sussman’s), by its adherents to this day.

The resulting degradation of the built environment is the most powerful reason for the continued relevance of classical architecture. President Andreozzi closed the event with a reminder that the chapter’s Bulfinch Awards are coming up on Saturday, April 29. Tickets to that event are available through a link on the chapter’s website.

Here are links to Eric Daum’s introduction and its illustrations:

Eric Daum intro text

Eric Daum intro illustrations

 

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Architecture of love’s prose

Posted on April 5, 2017 by David Brussat
Screen Shot 2017-04-05 at 12.40.18 PM.png

Sir Roger pays court to Widow, with confidante. (Project Gutenberg)

Reprinting this long passage from Richard Steele’s essay No. 113 in The Spectator of Monday, July 10, 1711, is meant to amuse readers who might have become bored with the plain prose about architecture that is the meat and potatoes of Architecture Here and There. Steele’s prose is not about architecture; it is architecture, indeed his prose is poetry. Architecture is a language no less than English. Steele’s cadences may be compared with the classical ornament that makes— … Oh, never mind. No excuses – just enjoy!

The Spectator was published daily in 555 numbers from March 1, 1711, until some date in 1712, after which it became intermittent. Steele, who with Joseph Addison also formed The Tatler in 1710, contributed numbers there and in The Spectator on a range of topics designed to enlighten and amuse. I have always found Steele the more pleasant, and far less pedantic than Addi- son. The Spectator has a stable of fictional characters, apparently based on real people, who often populate the essays. In this example, Steele has Sir Roger de Coverley describe his most vexing disappointment in Love:

***

“I can assure you I was not a little pleased with the kind Looks and Glances I had from all the Balconies and Windows, as I rode [as county sheriff] to the Hall where the Assizes were held. But when I came there, a beautiful Creature in a Widow’s Habit sat in Court, to hear the Event of a Case concerning her Dower. This commanding Creature (who was born for Destruction of all who behold her) put on such a Resignation in her Countenance, and bore the Whispers of all around the Court with such a pretty Uneasiness, I warrant you, and then recovered her self from one Eye to another, till she was perfectly confused by meeting something so wistful in all she encountered, that at last, … she cast her bewitching Eye upon me. I no sooner met it, but I bowed like a great surprized Booby; and knowing her Case to be the first which came on, I cried, like a captivated Calf as I was, Make Way for the Defendant’s Witnesses. This sudden Partiality made all the County immediately see the Sheriff also was become a Slave to the fine Widow. …

“You must understand, Sir, this perverse Woman is one of those unaccountable Creatures, that secretly rejoice in the Admiration of Men, but indulge themselves in no further Consequences. Hence it is that she has ever had a Train of Admirers, and she removes from her Slaves in Town to those in the Country, according to the Seasons of the Year. She is a reading Lady, and far gone in the Pleasures of Friendship: she is always accompanied by a Confidant, who is Witness to her daily Protestations against our Sex, and consequently a bar to her first Steps towards Love, upon the Strength of her own Maxims and Declarations.

“However, I must needs say this accomplished Mistress of mine has distinguished me above the rest, and has been known to declare Sir Roger de Coverley was the tamest and most humane of all the Brutes in the Country. I was told she said so, by one who thought he rallied me; but upon the Strength of this slender Encouragement of being thought least detestable, … I set out to make my Addresses. …

“[W]hen I came to her House I was admitted to her Presence with great Civility; at the same Time she placed herself to be first seen by me in such an Attitude, as I think you call the Posture of a Picture, that she discovered new Charms, and I at last came towards her with such an Awe as made me speechless. This she no sooner observed but she made her Advantage of it, and began a Discourse to me concerning Love and Honour. … Her Confidant sat by her, and upon my being in the last Confusion and Silence, this malicious Aide of hers turning to her says, ‘I am very glad to observe Sir Roger pauses upon this Subject, and seems resolved to deliver all his Sentiments upon the Matter when he pleases to speak.’ They both kept their Countenances, and after I had sat half an Hour meditating how to behave before such profound Casuists, I rose up and took my Leave.

“Chance has since that Time thrown me very often in her Way, and she as often has directed a Discourse to me which I do not understand. This Barbarity has kept me ever at a Distance from the most beautiful Object my Eyes ever beheld. It is thus also she deals with all Mankind, and you must make Love to her, as you would conquer the Sphinx, by posing her. … After she had done speaking to me, she put her Hand to her Bosom and adjusted her Tucker. Then she cast her Eyes a little down, upon my beholding her too earnestly. They say she sings excellently: her Voice in her ordinary Speech has something in it inexpressibly sweet. …

“I can assure you, Sir, were you to behold her, you would be in the same Condition; for as her Speech is Musick, her Form is Angelick. But I find I grow irregular while I am talking of her; but indeed it would be stupidity to be unconcerned at such perfection. Oh the excellent creature! she is as inimitable to all women, as she is inaccessible to all men.”

I found my Friend begin to rave, and insensibly led him towards the House, that we might be joined by some other Company; and am convinced that the Widow is the secret Cause of all that Inconsistency which appears in some Parts of my Friend’s Discourse. …

Posted in Architecture, Books and Culture | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment