A bit late

Want to Make an Architect Cry?

Give him (or her, but she’s less likely to mind) Robert A. M. Stern’s latest monograph, which, at 600+ pages, covers just his last five years of work. Five. It is really a flabbergasting number of buildings, boom years or no boom years, and that after 40 years of practice. (Full disclosure: Bob Stern sent me this book as a gift, since I have been on his mailing list ever since I wrote a semi-snarky profile of him in New York Magazine—apparently not online—upon his appointment as dean of the Yale School of Architecture. This post is by no means looking a gift horse in the mouth. He got me back in his latest New York architecture tome.)

Since this is the sixth volume published of Stern’s work (a number rivaled, among living architects, only by Richard Meier and Renzo Piano), he does not indulge in retrospective images. It would have been fun to include a photo of his first houses, mentioned in passing in his introductory “conversation” with Paul Goldberger.

What one does miss, of course, from when one is brand new in practice, is the thrill of the first or the second or the third commission…

How long ago that must seem to him. I remember one early house in particular, maybe published in Vincent Scully’s Shingle Style Today, which is indeed covered in shingles, and has a long gable roof, but muddies the waters with a switchback entrance and asymmetrical windows. This is where Bob Stern came from, the adolescent postmodernism of Venturi et. al. The suavity, the symmetry, the luxury came later. I can’t support what Stern does, I am too much of a modernist for that, but I can report that he does it the best. If you are going to remake the past, at least do it with the correct proportions, quality materials, and a sense of the variation within a style. Perhaps because of these awkward early years, by and large, he does.

What’s more interesting now, after 40 years, is the way his own history is catching up to him. Modernism is now a historic, post-modernized by many unawares. As Stern correctly says

…modernism has become a style and an ideology. In fact we now live in a period of revived modernism in which architecture students and young practitioners are doing things that make me smile. I mean, I wouldn’t be as blatantly devoted to some of my precedents as they seem to be to Case Study houses in California.

In his design for the George W. Bush Presidential Center Stern seems to be quoting those early years, the dawning of questions even in the mind of Philip Johnson about the rightness of the glass box for everything. Could Stern’s practice begin to include a certain neo-neo-classicism? Could he bring the Lincoln Center marble palace back, just as Diller Scofidio + Renfro deconstruct it? Or begin to steal work from the Meiers and the Pianos through sheer force of charm and competence? Signs of this possibility in the recent book include Northrup Hall, at Trinity University in San Antonio, and the International Quilt Study Center at the University of Nebraska. He practically says it himself.

Yes, but there is nothing wrong if you set out to make a copy. If you can make a really good copy, you’re a pretty good architect in my opinion. Most architects can’t do it. “Eyes that do not see,” Le Corbusier said; they can’t make a good copy.

That’s the way to disarm your critics.

In a F.O.G.

Image of DZ Bank, Berlin, by Manuela Martin

The fall semester is not yet over, and I have been plunged into spring semester planning. I am teaching architecture criticism again, this time to undergraduates in NYU’s Urban Design and Architecture Studies program. I am thinking of adding films for the first time, partly as a fill-in for days when written critiques are due and few students actually do the reading assignment (2.5 hours is a long time when no one has anything to say but me), partly as a way to show a different form of architectural criticism, partly to give them something else to critique. The problem may be in keeping my mouth shut.

I started my pre-viewing with Sketches of Frank Gehry, Sydney Pollack’s 2005 documentary. I have been avoiding this film for years, not a Gehry fan, and I thought I might not make it through the first five minutes, so saccharine was the tone. I calmed down, and so did the hagiography (for a while), but I can’t say I learned a thing. It is deeply strange when a film about a contemporary architect never mentions any other living practitioner of architecture; uses only friends of Frank, all artists, buddies, clients (or all three), to comment on his work; and treats the only living architect most people have heard of as an embattled revolutionary figure. Maybe that was true of Gehry in 1975, or even 1985, but it is not any more, and after years of group therapy, he should know it. (As a side note, when Gehry’s therapist mentions that other architects have come to him hoping to be head-shrunk into geniuses, I couldn’t help but think of my husband’s former boss, also a group therapy habitue, and also someone who thinks of himself as an embattled revolutionary figure.)

Sketches plays like what it is, a noodling side project for a couple of old friends (Pollock is on camera half the time, and we often hear him agreeing with whatever Barry Diller, Thomas Krens et al. are saying in praise), tanned, leather-jacketed, successful. Gehry’s aw-shucks act is only eclipsed by Pollock’s, in a scene where he acts as if he has no idea why Frank asked him to make the documentary, and hasn’t the least idea how to do it.

But maybe he doesn’t. If the adulation hadn’t gotten to me, the lack of any brilliant scenography would have. The good thing about a film about architecture occasionally making it into theaters is the opportunity to expose more people to the thrills of buildings far away. The experiential and emotional qualities that the late Herbert Muschamp (also on screen praising Gehry above all others) was so good at dramatizing can be shown. But Pollock only tells, largely shooting the outsides of Gehry’s buildings in no particular order. The inside shots are static overviews with busy people. We never follow a ramp, discover titanium around a corner, get blinded by a reflection. We never get down on the ground, so one of the most interesting and controversial aspects of Gehry’s work, its urbanism, is totally lost.

I could go on: about the punch-pulling inherent in using an academic critic like Hal Foster, with whom no viewer will ever identify, as the lone negative voice; about the vague and invidious rejection of unnamed other architects’ work as “white cubes”; and so forth. But I won’t, because the way Gehry and Pollock set it up, I can only sound like a stick-in-the-mud unable to accept change.

XL

UnBeige informs me that the High Museum of Art has prepared a tribute to John Portman, Atlanta’s ur-architect and greatest claim to urban influence (judgment suspended). The mind reels with metastatic critical possibilities for such a show—Mike Davis on the Bonaventure Hotel, quotations from J.G. Ballard’s High Rise—but one suspects this is not that show. Portman’s own art, typically shown in the lobby of the building that is his portrait, the Marriott Marquis (1985), is on display within the walls of another architect(s) museum. That hotel, seen above via Atelier FLIR, was best described by Rem Koolhaas in SMLXL. A brief excerpt (see page 833ff.):

John Portman is also responsible for single-handedly perfecting a device that spread from Atlanta to the rest of America, and from America to the rest of the world 9even Europe): he (re)invented the atrium.

Since the Romans, the atrium had been a hole in a house or building that injects light an air—the outside—into the center; in Portman’s hands it became the opposite: a container of artificiality that allows its occupants to avoid daylight forever—a hermetic interior, seated against the real…

The new atrium became a replica as inclusive as downtown itself, an ersatz downtown. Downtown’s buildings are no longer complementary; they don’t need each other; they become hostile; they compete…With atriums as private mini-centers, buildings no longer depend on specific locations. They can be anywhere.

And if they can be anywhere, why should they be downtown?

That was Portman’s Paradox.

The rediscovery of downtown quickly degenerated into a proliferation of quasi-downtowns that together destroyed the essence of center.

In other words, after Manhattanism, Portmanism. If Portman hadn’t existed, Koolhaas might have had to invent him, so interested is he in resuscitating the ideas of a certain set of third-tier architects, smart men who went the way of commerce and developed forms that, once copied, they could not control. Wallace K. Harrison falls into this category (see the XYZ Buildings on Sixth Avenue), as well as Victor Gruen, father of the mall, from whom I think Koolhaas derived his now-passed theory of “junkspace.” It is ironic that the only Portman atrium I have actually experienced is not in the land of air-conditioning (much of Portman’s current work is is Asia) but the land of internal combustion, Detroit, where the Renaissance Center (no need to make a joke) sits just one street away from the real downtown, and sucks the life out of it in solitary splendor.