That's just one of many very similar comments on the NYT article, "The 25 Most Significant Works of Postwar Architecture Three architects, three journalists and two designers gathered over Zoom to make a list of the most influential and lasting buildings that have been erected — or cleverly updated — since World War II. Here are the results."
I recommend clicking through to see the many photographs. If you do, I predict you will find yourself muttering or exclaiming things like, "I hate all of these!" Or perhaps, "Where's Frank Lloyd Wright?"
To be fair, "most influential and lasting" doesn't mean most beautiful or most beneficial. It could mask dismay: This is what took hold and has tormented us for so long.
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22 comments:
"the horror, the horror..."
Simply execute two searches. Boston City Hall and Boston Old City Hall. Tells you all you need to know in two images.
Regression to the mean takes multiple forms. also - The word 'mean' has multiple meanings.
The problems in the architectural world are a microcosm of the larger problems in society between the "elite" and the masses. The elite have become obsessed with novel theories, rejected- if not outright hostile to- traditional ideas about aesthetics, and continued to spiral deeper into a hole of self-congratulatory claptrap and status chasing. You want to know how you get Trump? Crap like this is a good place to start. The rest of us got tired of living in a world of ugly buildings and ugly policies, none of which worked well for us, but made people with the right connections wealthy, and allowed them to shower each other with praise.
shows just how divorced from reality the architectural intelligentsia has been for the better part of 100 years now.
Why should we expect the architectural intelligentsia be any different from the rest of their class?
Damn. I'd love to see this article, but...alas, I'm locked out.
I believe it was Prince Phillip of the UK royals who remarked that Brit architects had done more damage to London than had the Luftwaffe
People think it's clever to hate on Frank.
I love Frank. I know it's cliche but he was so ahead of his time. How can one not admire his masterful achievement of marrying architecture and nature?
People think it's clever to hate on Frank. I love Frank.
Well, OK, but there's some really bad Frank. Google "Marin Civic Center" for an example. That's "marrying architecture and nature," in the sense that it looks like a very large jellyfish washed up on a beach.
What I want to know is, where's the World Trade Center? I mean, putting aside what happened to it, wasn't it influential?
They managed to leave out some of the ugliest, though. No Cooper Union Free School; no Bilbao museum . . .
The clear answer is Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. It is Modern/Brutalist garbage and is viewed each day by the future architects from Harvard. For good or ill, it is certainly significant.
I would actually like to see these buildings- but not enough to pay for the privilege. I'm actually not dismayed or dismissive about modern architecture- even brutalism. Like everything else it is a reflection of the times in which it was built. Some of it was silly. Some magnificent and just because you don't like it, you can't say it is bad. At least it isn't boring- which to me is the greatest indictment.
I am not an architect but I did flunk out of architecture school having been cursed with an acute absence of artistic talent. Nevertheless, these are my selective comments:
1. I love Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, popularly called "The Glass House."
2. It is said that Finland has one of the highest rates of suicide in the world. It is also surmised that many of these occurred after viewing Alvar Aalto’s Saynatsalo's Town Hall in Jyvaskyla, Finland.
3. Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif. If the inspiration for this monstrosity was not George Orwell, it should have been.
4. Jorn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House in Sydney, Australia. Been there; done that. The only thing I'll say is that it is much more impressive in photographs than it is in real life.
5. Juliaan Lampens’s Van Wassenhove House in Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium. I have it on good authority that the Supermax Federal prison in Florence, CO is a derivative of this house, but with more charm.
6. Frank Lloyd Wright. A few of his creations were spectacular, Falling Water, The Guggenheim, the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, and the Robbie house, to name four. Others were pedestrian and almost all were unliveable particularly if adorned with FLW furniture.
British philosopher Roger Scruton understood all this not just as a mistake of style but a product of cultural Marxism. A great documentary about him and his ideas: "Why Beauty Matters." https://missliberty.com/why-beauty-matters-roger-scruton-explains/
I read this article when it was originally published but have now exceeded my free article limit so can't (or won't) get back to it. However, I don't agree all the buildings cited in the article are horrors. Some like the Johnson Publishing building in Chicago do deface their surroundings and have been included simply because the architect was a Black acolyte of Mies. Others like the painted houses or the Pompidou Centre are just gimmicks. But I really do believe the Farnsworth House, the Seagram Building and the Sydney Opera House are great works of architecture. That being said, Wright, Saarinen and Gehry's omission from that compendium shows how political it is -- it was more important to list a Who's Who in Timbuktu of world architects than to highlight the truly great ones.
But as a building, how do they function? Do the people who work in them like them or hate them? Are the people/organizations that paid for them and keep them in good running condition happy with their purchase?
I've seen it said, qua Prince Philip, that short of area bombing, nothing does as much destruction to a city's buildings as rent control, but town & country planners come a close second.
I blame Ayn Rand.
A brutalist piece like Boston's City Hall prevents infiltration of rain water and exacerbates flooding. Rail against concrete for that reason!
I gave up after the first photo. It's a nondescript patio of some kind, that doesn't really tell you anything at all about what makes the building "influential" and "lasting". If anything, the irregular outline and color blocks make it look derivative and faddish.
I'm a big fan of Frank Lloyd Wright's work, but I wouldn't want to live in a house he designed. Lovely to look at and tour, but not practical at all for how me and mine live. In short, they're striking but non-functional, which is the opposite of what good design is.
Our hostess may have been to Wingspread in Racine, WI. Two facts and a single incident were shared during a tour that were particularly memorable. (Of course, I'll get some memorable detail a bit wrong.)
Fact #1: All the secondary bedrooms were tiny with windows high up that gave little natural light because FLW wanted people out of the bedrooms and socializing in the common areas when they were awake. Bedrooms were only for sleeping and if you weren't sleeping, you needed to be in the common areas interacting.
Fact #2: The unique sloped ceiling in the main living room made up of many framed small glass panels leaked from install but FLW didn't care when informed. (Windows had to be re-engineered and re-manufactured, more than once I believe, before the leaking stopped.)
Single incident: The wife of the owner who had commissioned the house as his residence (the Johnson who was chairman/CEO of SC Johnson) had put her chosen artwork on the walls and later had FLW stay a few nights for a visit. Overnight, FLW found where the original artwork he had selected had been stored, took down the wife's artwork, and rehung his selections in their original places. (He was never a guest again.)
Big generalized conclusions: "designer" architecture is much more about the architect than it is about the people who hire them or the people who have to live or wok in the product of their creativity.
And FLW was a pill in the extreme.
Is no one going to mention From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe? He makes a pretty convincing case that these aren't just "elitists", but that they are a specific brand of anti-traditional, anti-bourgeois elitists. I would say "leftists", but that word has lost its original significance and now just means anyone Sean Hannity doesn't like.
The English physician and writer Anthony Daniels has written eloquently about the ugliness of modern architecture.
A point I’ve made before: One of the reasons modern art; painting, sculpture, orchestral music, in addition to architecture, is so generally hideous is that artists stopped making things for patrons or for the public, and began to feed at the public or foundation troughs; and began to create to impress one another. This trend cropped up after WW II - it’s roots went back before then, but 1945 is a handy starting point.
A patron in the olden days could say, “I’m not paying for that crap”, whereas public officials and foundation hacks could be bullied: if you don’t like this, you’re a Phillistine. No one wants to be seen, in the company of their Upper East Side, or West Hollywood pals as being like one of those mouth breathers out in The Valley, or ‘gasp’ New Jersey. Let’s not even think about places like the South, or Ohio and Indiana.
Frank Gehry is one of the main villains here- his Experience Music Project building in Seattle, as well as the Weisman Art Museum on the University of Minnesota campus are both hideous; the Weisman has the added bonus that at certain times of the year, when driving across the Washington Avenue Bridge the sun shines off the building, blinding the eastbound drivers. Joe Queenan has a great take down of the EMP in his book Basalmic Dreams, although it’s more about the stupidity of the museum itself, rather than the architecture.
One building that does not get its due in the ugliness department is the Fine Arts building at the University of Massachusetts- a visiting friend once described it as resembling an uncompleted freeway off-ramp.
Oh, and the Mario Cuomo Bridge, which replaced the old Tappan Zee Bridge between Westchester and Rockland counties in New York, is already showing structural problems. There’s gotta be a punchline in there somewhere…
And Jack of Clubs, you make an excellent point- Wolfe’s book is excellent.
>>the Robbie house, to name four. Others were pedestrian and almost all were unliveable particularly if adorned with FLW furniture.
>>I'm a big fan of Frank Lloyd Wright's work, but I wouldn't want to live in a house he designed. Lovely to look at and tour, but not practical at all for how me and mine live.
I emailed Althouse not too long ago about my experience with the Robie (not Robbie) House and some other Chicago landmarks (not sure that's quite the right word for what I was talking about), but I didn't follow up on whether she posted it. I won't repeat the whole story but one point was about FLW's, um, rigidity about how his residential buildings should be occupied (i.e., the "FLW furniture"). The Robie House has some wonderful and inspired features as a building, particularly given its location. But also some FLW dictates that, if you want to live here, this is how you *must* live.
--gpm
Gehry's bandstand in Millennium Park in Chicago looks quite impressive. Whether it actually works, I don't know.
His weird building at MIT in Cambridge is apparently quite the disaster.
--gpm
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