Architecture/Cosmopolis

I've seen the future . . .

2012-03-11T17:38:00.002-04:00

and it's not pretty. Actually, some of them are pretty, but few of them seem practical or sustainable.

And only a small number of these visionary skyscraper designs from eVolo seem to be sited in urban areas. In fact, many of them seem to be downright abusive of the natural environment.

"Neutrality" is not good enough

2012-03-08T15:35:00.000-05:00

A school district in suburban Minneapolis has settled a suit on gay bullying, but the underlying issues have not been addressed: "In response to conflicting pressures, Anoka-Hennepin officials had devised an unusual policy, directing teachers to remain neutral on any questions involving sexual orientation. But some teachers said that this hampered their ability to support gay students and that the overall climate was still hostile." Some members of the school board commented with galling callousness:

Tom Heidemann, chairman of the schoolboard, said the settlement “likely saved the district millions of dollars and many years of ongoing litigation.”

Kathy Tinglestad, the lone dissenter on the board who voted against settling, decided she would play the victim and resign over the disagreement. “Like a target of bullying,” said Tinglestad, “I choose to leave this situation, by resigning, instead of fighting back against the out-of-state bullies… [who] drug [this issue] through the mud.”

On a better note, the latest episode of Glee beautifully handles the subject of an attempted suicide due to gay bullying, unintentionally highlighting the cowardice in Minnesota. (The video also makes passing reference to so-called social networking as fuel to hysteria, rumors, and accusations, and not just about gay kids):

What perfection

2012-03-06T18:36:00.001-05:00

So gloriously perfect. He shall henceforth be known here as Willard R-Money.

And now for the bad news

2012-03-06T00:28:00.000-05:00

I think this is broadly correct:

Humanity has three unique challenges at this point: 1) an impending climate change disaster [the latest NASA study of Arctic "perennial ice" coverage offers a stark reminder of the permanent damage already done] that would require an international Apollo program-style, multi-industry endeavor to switch to renewable energies; 2) a general economic malaise with huge numbers of people out of work; and 3) international conflicts centered around oil-producing regions of the globe.

These problems could all be solved by an international economic focus on putting people to work to develop renewable energy. People from research scientists to engineers to laborers to white-collar professionals would all be employable in the transition with real, non-outsourceable jobs in every country on earth; a global climate disaster would possibly be averted; and there would be no more need to bomb people in desert countries that happen to have oil underneath them. Win-win-win. It's a time of extraordinary potential for humanity.

But instead, the world's best and brightest are obsessed with austerity measured to protect the health of the parasitic financial services industry, while allowing war and climate change to continue unabated.

We are nowhere near to solving any of these problems. In fact, as Atkins suggests, we are actively moving away from the solutions because of austerity.

I'd go beyond Atkins, though, who argues that we ignore the obvious solutions "due to corruption and lack of collective will." The problem is not just "corruption," although we suffer no scarcity on that account. We have long-term, systemic problems revolving around the ways we think about political economy and the ways we have structured our zombie capitalism.

Well, at least the Obama administration is living up to its change rhetoric and finally rejecting Bush-era executive branch power grabbing and illegality. Or not. Actually, we are now fully entrenched in "this lawless abyss." (Holder's full speech here).

Update March 6: Glenn Greenwald has posted excellent commentary on this latter issue.

Image of the day: Florence v. Sprawl

2012-03-05T17:22:00.001-05:00

The almost unbelievable consumption of space and natural environment by sprawling suburbia can easily be visualized by comparison to traditional urbanism:

Laurie Fendrich's take on Cindy Sherman

2012-03-03T16:29:00.003-05:00

Cindy Sherman: Untitled No. 224, 1990 (image: Saatchi Gallery)

Here. An excerpt:

By any measure, Sherman is an important artist. Everyone concurs that she’s the one who took photography out of its specialized niche in the art world and brought it into museum galleries to be hung alongside paintings.

Sherman’s career took off with her Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), photographs that were eventually purchased by MoMA, in 1995, for a cool $1,000,000. In these black and white photos, Sherman turned her own self, decked out and posed in ways that made it seem as if she’s a movie star in a movie, into the subject. The gimmick is that even though we feel as if we’ve seen the movie star (or starlet, as was really the case) before, and we feel sure we’ve actually seen the movie from which the still comes, Sherman invented the whole shebang. Everything. There is no original actress or movie. Sherman simply plays the role of an actress playing a role. It’s as simple as that, yet underneath this lies the vast pit of postmodern thought cocksure that the self is nothing but a concatenation of slippery, shifting, assumed identities rather than any real, authentic self.

Dear Mr. Pugin:

2012-03-02T23:39:00.000-05:00

Sorry for missing your birthday on March 1. Felicem diem natalem.

Pugin was a religious zealot (classicism is Paganism!), and a very, very excellent designer.

A. W. N. Pugin: St Giles, Cheadle, Staffordshire, UK, built 1841-46 (image: flickr.com)

"An entertainer can be absurd"

2012-03-02T21:32:00.001-05:00

Coming from Rick Santorum (about the wretched, pathetic Limbaugh), these words are rich on many levels:

"'He's being absurd, but that's you know, an entertainer can be absurd,' Santorum said. 'He's in a very different business than I am.'"

Oh, irony, what cruel tricks you play.

Speaking of tricks: Poor Mitt.

A little man

2012-02-27T22:34:00.000-05:00

Rick Santorum, to use his own words, "makes me throw up." He is a very, very little man, and gives the lie to the myth that religion and morality go hand-in-hand.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Alberti, master pastry chef

2012-02-25T22:50:00.001-05:00

Leon Battista Alberti, as pictured in Cosimo Bartoli's 1550 edition of Alberti's De re aedificatoria of 1485 (source: Wikipedia Commons)

Clio's Calendar has posted a spirited take on the central importance of Alberti in modern architecture:

[Alberti] wrote the first great book on architecture. Yes, we know (believe me, we know) about Vitruvius. But really. Vitruvius is only interesting because of what other people did with him. Saying Vitruvius is the big deal is like saying a bag of flour is a big deal, when you have a torte di mandorla sitting there in the kitchen. The flour was important, but it’s the pastry chef who deserves the accolades.

Alberti is that chef. With very, very little evidence to work from, either textual or physical, he explained what the Renaissance was supposed to be, and spun out architectural theory that was the first and last word for centuries. Filarete added some engaging images and wrote a fun narrative; Francesco di Giorgio actually worked out a lot of the design problems, then Palladio and the rest served up a bunch of as-built drawings to illustrate what was largely reheated Alberti; some fussy French people had their querelle; all the wonderful Neos dove off Alberti into their own little pools of Classicism. It wasn’t until Pugin put pen to paper in the 1840s that something really different was proposed; after him, it’s Sant’Elia, but that’s it. These last two voiced some important and interesting and influential concerns, but even they are just the most important of their tribes which are largely formed in response to Alberti in the first place: they did not invent a tribe, as did Alberti, through his one great book.

It's interesting to note in this context the recent book by Marvin Trachtenberg, Building-in-Time. He argues that Alberti's theory of "building-outside-time" is a root element of all modernist architecture.

Color in Islamic art

2012-02-25T16:23:00.002-05:00

A new book, reviewed at Three Pipe Problem.

"The richness, or the incoherence, of a library is the richness, or the incoherence, of the self"

2012-02-24T22:31:00.001-05:00

Jan Van Eyck: Saint Jerome in His Study, c. 1435 (image: Detroit Institute of Arts)

From Leon Wieseltier at TNR:

They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight—matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows. And a book is more than a text: even if every book in my library is on Google Books, my library is not on Google Books. A library has a personality, a temperament. (Sometimes a dull one.) Its books show the scars of use and the wear of need. They are defaced—no, ornamented—by markings and notes and private symbols of assent and dissent, and these vandalisms are traces of the excitations of thought and feeling, which is why they are delightful to discover in old books: they introduce a person. There is something inhuman about the pristinity of digital publication. It lacks fingerprints. But the copy of a book that is on my shelf is my copy. It is unlike any other copy, it has been individuated; and even those books that I have not yet opened—unread books are an essential element of a library—were acquired for the further cultivation of a particular admixture of interests and beliefs, and every one of them will have its hour. The knowledge that qualifies one to be one’s own librarian is partly self-knowledge. The richness, or the incoherence, of a library is the richness, or the incoherence, of the self.

Loitering: "a word that celebrates the fact that we’ve forgotten how to design cities"

2012-02-24T09:40:00.000-05:00

In The Atlantic Cities, Emily Badger has a post about the emptying of American cities, the decline of public space, and the concurrent rise of "no loitering" injunctions beginning in the 1960s. The ability to go slow--to stroll, mill about, or just sit for any stretch of time--is an essential hallmark of a public space. Actually, it is especially characteristic of those "middle spaces" that are not large ceremonial squares (think St. Peter's Square, although one has to stand there a while and slowly move through the space just to take it all in) but are more than mere openings or street widenings (think Piazza del Paradiso). Often these other spaces allow for and sometimes encourage slow going, but the point is that middle spaces--spaces for markets, parks, and everyday squares--are inherently conducive to going slow.

Rebuild Old Penn Station?

2012-02-17T23:30:00.002-05:00

Old Pennsylvania Station, New York, by McKim, Mead & White, built 1903-10 (image: Library of Congress)

John Massengale is right: it's an idea that deserves a public hearing.

Times' architecture critic Michael Kimmelman's original piece is here.

Cezanne on top

2012-02-09T16:32:00.002-05:00

The royal family of Qatar has spent the astronomical sum of $250 million to acquire a Cezanne painting, establishing a new record for the most expensive sale of an artwork whether privately bought or at auction. The previous record, $140 million for Jackson Pollock's No. 5, was set in 2006; the Pollock sale broke the record of a Klimt painting sold earlier that same year for $135 million. The still-reigning record for an auction price is the $106 million paid for Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust, in May 2010 (although, adjusted for inflation, that Picasso ranks fourth, behind a Van Gogh, a Renoir, and another Picasso work).

I can't imagine that the Cezanne record will be broken in the next few years, but the zeal of the .000000173% of the world's wealthiest individuals and ruling families (like Qatar's monarchy) for acquiring prestige objects like this should not be underestimated. According to Wikipedia's list, seven of the top ten highest prices have been set since 2004, more evidence of the pecuniary advantages for those at the top of the growing global wealth disparity. The Cezanne painting was one of the most sought-after works of art, partly because its previous owner carefully cultivated its mystique.

Against the city, against the UN

2012-02-06T23:08:00.001-05:00

Madness, reported in the New York Times.

Commentary from Digby, noting the "paranoid strain" in American politics at work here--something of the "precious bodily fluids" type.

Just what is it that makes contemporary art so different, so appealing?

2012-02-05T21:38:00.002-05:00

Richard Hamilton: Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, 1956, Kunsthalle Tübingen.

Art historian Robert Baldwin has posted a useful essay on his website discussing the so-called "crisis in art history"--that is, the proliferation of interest in contemporary art at the expense of earlier periods. He provides much to think about, especially as it regards the contemporary gallery/museum world, the role of technology and technology distraction, and the larger context of the crisis of the academic job market (which is, all things considered, a very serious crisis).

Perhaps the economics of the contemporary university could be further emphasized. As colleges increasingly adopt the business-corporate model of performance/productivity/relevance value, all the humanities suffer. But pre-contemporary art history especially suffers since in the business-corporate model the history of this art has little quantifiable economic value or "real-world relevance."

Not a good time to be an architect, except for 6,973 of them

2012-02-05T17:48:00.000-05:00

The precise figures are impossible to know. But it's not good for the architects. Except for the 6,973 who are in the top 1% of household wealth. The full run-down of 1%ers thanks to the New York Times.

Tenements and narrow streets

2012-02-04T21:30:00.002-05:00

Old Urbanist again has some perceptive comments about New York's urbanism, in this case about an historical irony in the construction of tenements (a good addendum to MCNY's exhibition on the city's grid plan):

With the new law tenements, New York had come full circle after nearly a century. The desire to eliminate courts and narrow streets, without an understanding for the reason they had come into being again and again in the traditional cities of the world, had led, unintentionally, to pre-law tenements, old law tenements and at last to the new, where narrow streets, courts and alleys – the very things which the initial 1811 plan had sought to abolish – were effectively re-introduced as the central design feature.

Conservatives

2012-02-02T13:27:00.000-05:00

Edmund Burke (image: fundacionburke.org)

Who are they? What does conservatism mean? The short answer: it's very difficult to say. There has been a lot of academic and popular debate about liberalism and its political traditions in recent decades--including much of relevance to architecture and urbanism--but to my mind conservatism has not been satisfactorily dealt with. Part of the problem is that contemporary conservatism is, on economic terms at least, a narrow version of classical liberalism (i.e., 19th-century laissez-faire)--that is, neoliberalism, which liberals, like me, oppose.

At The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf provides a list of 21 often conflicting possible principles, including some that strike me as totally meaningless. For instance, no. 15: "A principled belief in federalism." Do liberals believe in unprincipled federalism? The list is certainly a conversation piece. As the writer notes, "The word is invoked to refer to a number of surprisingly diverse worldviews -- and politicians take advantage of that." With a large chunk of Americans self-identifying as conservative--about double the number who say they are liberal--it's worth spending time thinking about the myriad meanings and uses of the word and the concepts behind it.

"A compliant gadget in service to a hedonistic, live-for-the-moment lifestyle"

2012-01-31T19:52:00.001-05:00

Le Corbusier: Villa Fallet, La Chaux-de-Fonds, France, 1905-7 (image: larryspeck.com)

Le Corbusier: Villa Savoye, Poissy, France, 1928-31 (image: larryspeck.com)

Peter Buchanan has a compelling and wide-ranging article at Architectural Review. He begins with a comparison of Le Corbusier's Villa Fallet, an enchanting 1907 confection, and Villa Savoye, the iconic International Style masterpiece of 1931. Although mostly impressionistic and sometimes rather breathless, Buchanan has urgent points to make. His larger issue is about sustainability, and his key points are about fossil fuels, the atomizing and dislocating elements of modernity, and the radical changes that will have to be undertaken as we take leave of modernity--and postmodernity.

On a minor note: The kind of eco-spiritualism Buchanan invokes seems to sit uncomfortably with almost all forms of urbanism today, but this is an area where much thinking still needs to be done.

He writes,

So what accounts for the differences between these villas? Specifically, what new material facilitated the profound shift in forms and sensibility? What do the history books say? Reinforced concrete? Plate glass? The answer is neither of these, nor any of the other usual explanations, but abundant and cheap fossil fuels. These powered the weekend commute to the house and kept warm in winter the large, flowing spaces enclosed in thin un-insulated concrete walls and slabs, with vast expanses of single glazing. It was also a related material − and later, oil derivatives − which waterproofed Villa Savoye’s and all other flat roofs and terraces. Later too, petrochemicals provided the neoprene gaskets, epoxies, mastics and sealants, as well as the synthetic carpets and fabrics.

And it was fossil fuel-derived electricity that lit and air-conditioned modern buildings, which often spurned natural light and ventilation. Modern architecture is thus an energy-profligate, petrochemical architecture, only possible when fossil fuels are abundant and affordable. Like the sprawling cities it spawned, it belongs to that waning era historians are already calling ‘the oil interval’. Although histories of modern architecture still overlook this critical fact − failing to note what is, literally, blindingly obvious−any future history must surely begin by noting this relationship, which is axiomatically unsustainable. . . .

The modern and contemporary built environment, and their corresponding lifestyles, are only possible because we do not live within the capacities of the Earth’s ambient energies and nature’s annual bounty but instead each year burn up a legacy accumulated over millions of years. . . .

Inside the modern house, the light, mobile modern furniture derives from that used on holidays − deck chairs and other folding equipment. These in turn were derived from the furniture used by the military and later by colonial administrators on safari. Military conquest through technological superiority and colonialism were further hubris-inducing enterprises that inspired aspects of modern architecture and design, largely initiated by colonial powers − France, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands. And from the colonised came many aspects of modern life, such as lighter and less constrictive clothing befitting the more spontaneous and relaxed lifestyle seen as concomitant with modern architecture. Recognising modern architecture’s antecedents in colonialism and conquest raises questions about how benign or psychologically healthy is the tendency to merely camp without establishing deep roots.

Nagel's "Controversy"

2012-01-25T22:59:00.001-05:00

The Controversy of Renaissance Art by Alexander Nagel was recently awarded the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award by the College Art Association. Nagel has a succinct summary of its argument at Rorotoko, where he writes that experimentation was the answer to the challenge of Church reform. Ultimately, he claims,

The difference between what happened in Italy and whathappened during the northern European reformations is that the Italians couldnot give up on the art. Whereas in the North one sees either outrightdestruction of images or a tolerance of images under careful doctrinal control,in Italy artists and reformers, despite their concerns, continued to believethat art could perform an important, transformative religious function. . . .

In their religious works, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titianand the other major artists of the period were attempting to join the highestambitions of art with the most exalted aims of religion. They developed some oftheir most innovative ideas in their efforts to resolve what they saw as major,epochal challenges to the integrity and legitimacy of religious art.

Jem Cohen on public space

2012-01-25T18:18:00.000-05:00

Filmmaker Jem Cohen writes about the excessive measures aimed at controlling the experience of public space in New York.

His short film, NYC Weights and Measures:

Leftovers

2012-01-25T16:37:00.002-05:00

Fragments of the past. I know three of them...

"Here I am, world": On Mozart

2012-01-21T13:26:00.000-05:00

Glenn Dicterow of the NY Philharmonic on one of my favorite Mozart pieces:

And Garrick Ohlsson on playing Mozart:

And on his first great piano concerto:

A new blog

2012-01-19T15:53:00.000-05:00

A new blog on architectural history for the new year: Clio's Calendar (via Matters of Taste).

Be sure to read the very interesting description of Clio's purpose. Clio, writing on behalf of her eight sisters, says "we are not here to help your small attempts to spin pure innovation out of nothingness. (If that is your goal, please move along now to my cousin Lethe’s blog–she will help you find the stream in Hades, the drinkers of which experience absolute forgetfulness.) We muses are here to help you find your way, and to help those who come after you."

Our too-comfortable Kings

2012-01-16T13:01:00.002-05:00

Image: history.com

Good comments to consider on this day, by Tom Sugrue from 2008.

Why we need to keep the lights on

2012-01-15T21:46:00.003-05:00

From Benjamin Barber:

There is no more dismal metaphor for America's abandonment of the public sphere than the decision by Highland Park to rip up a swath of its street lights in the name of public parsimony. Whether in Asia, Africa or Latin America, the first thing any township aspiring to civility and modernity does is put up street lights. Why? Because doing so keeps the emerging public square illuminated 24 hours a day, because it pushes private violence out of town into the shadows beyond, because it symbolizes the coming of civilized daily life where the right to safe public spaces is an essential priority of what it means to live in civility -- and in time, under democracy.

Dewey's wise words

2012-01-15T00:14:00.001-05:00

According to John Dewey, classical liberalism (today's neoliberalism), "in the very act of asserting that it stood completely and loyally for the principle of individual freedom, was really engaged in justifying the activities of a new form of concentrated power--the economic, which . . . has consistently and persistently denied effective freedom to the economically underpowered and underprivileged." (Liberalism and Social Action, 1935)

Dewey was hardly the first to make this point, but he does it here with admirable concision. The main thrust of contemporary conservatism, I think, is not fundamentally about a theory of human nature, organic community, religious authority, or any of the traditionally conservative concerns, though they do have a continuing presence. It is, instead, about the denial of or even refusal to engage with Dewey's insight about the self-undermining and socially destructive consequences of "economic freedom."

Constitutional fundamentalism

2012-01-11T17:40:00.003-05:00

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Which architecture matters?

2012-01-09T17:08:00.001-05:00

Patrick Haughey has some challenging comments about the state of architectural education, especially the way the history of modern architecture is framed and taught as "a story of authorship, form and connoisseurship."

Much of what Haughey writes about is neatly stuffed into the "vernacular architecture" folder (and promptly forgotten by most other architectural historians). The shift he calls for is huge--and necessary.

Perceiving color

2012-01-09T15:03:00.001-05:00

Some interesting comments.

Libeskind strikes again

2012-01-05T21:52:00.001-05:00

An act of aggression is, I suppose, fitting for a military museum.

Reich on public good

2012-01-05T00:40:00.002-05:00

Robert Reich has a new post on the loss of the public good. This is something I think Democrats need to talk about much, much more.

Reich very justly writes about the origins of the American recognition of the public good during the Progressive Era:

The great expansion of public institutions in America began in the early years of 20th century when progressive reformers championed the idea that we all benefit from public goods. Excellent schools, roads, parks, playgrounds, and transit systems would knit the new industrial society together, create better citizens, and generate widespread prosperity. Education, for example, was less a personal investment than a public good — improving the entire community and ultimately the nation.

Although he doesn't frame it this way, this is essentially a republican (small-r) vision of common citizenship. It is diametrically opposed to laissez-faire and neo-liberalism. We desperately need some political leaders to articulate this message. Obama used to do it a bit, and occasionally still does, but the actions of his administration on many fronts do not leave me confident he is really committed to it. Perhaps the only major political figure advancing some form of this message right now is Bernie Sanders. In general, Republicans are completely in the throes of the neo-liberal agenda while Democrats mostly espouse a very weak vision of minimal welfare supports. Neither party is interested in getting at the root of the problem.

Reich asks,

Why the decline of public institutions? The financial squeeze on government at all levels since 2008 explains only part of it. The slide really started more than three decades ago with so-called “tax revolts” by a middle class whose earnings had stopped advancing even though the economy continued to grow. Most families still wanted good public services and institutions but could no longer afford the tab.

I think this is part of the answer, but the full extent of the problem goes deeper into ideological territory and further back in time. A rediscovery of lost republican communalism can help articulate the priority of the public good.

The official Driehaus announcement

2011-12-14T13:07:00.001-05:00

A revealing quote from below: "In key structures such as the Portland (Oregon) Public Services Building and Humana Corporation headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, Graves' designs are characterized for [sic] their attention to human scale and dignity."

Now, Graves buildings are certainly interesting specimens of postmodernism, but are they really all that attentive to "human-scale and dignity"? And are they really very classical? After all, this is an award for excellence in classicism. For instance:

Michael Graves, Humana Building, Louisville, KY (image: glen.h on flickr.com)

Michael Graves named 2012 Driehaus Prize laureate

Architect and designer's expansive body of work has enhanced the experience of everyday life

Michael Graves, whose celebrated career redefined the architect's role in society, has been named the recipient of the 2012 Richard H. Driehaus Prize at the University of Notre Dame. Graves, the tenth Driehaus Prize laureate, will receive $200,000 and a bronze miniature of the Choregic Monument of Lysikrates during a March 24 ceremony in Chicago.

Graves is Founding Principal of the firm Michael Graves & Associates (MGA) and the Robert Schirmer Professor of Architecture, Emeritus at Princeton University, where he taught for 39 years. At Princeton, Graves reintroduced the principles of traditional and classical composition and also brought a dedication to urbanism to a modernist curriculum. Receiving the Rome Prize in 1960 as a scholar at the American Academy in Rome, where he is now a Trustee, Graves was influenced by "the timeless grammar" of architecture that he has applied to his own work. Members of the Driehaus Prize jury commended his commitment to the traditional city-in its human scale, complexity, and vitality-as emblematic of a time-tested sustainability.

In structures such as the Portland (Oregon) Public Services Building and Humana Corporation headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, Graves' designs are characterized for their attention to human scale and dignity. His concern for the character of his buildings extends to his interior design, the lighting, fixtures, and furniture that he regards as essential to the overall character he aspires to create.

Graves considers himself a "general practitioner." His influential designs, extending from buildings including the iconic Denver Central Library to everyday objects such as his celebrated Alessi teakettle, reflect the breadth of his interests and the depth of his humanistic instincts. Attention to enhancing the user experience characterizes all his work, from luxury goods to products for Target Stores. The beauty and quality of ordinary objects, Graves believes, have the power to affect the soul.

Graves also views urbanism as a vital part of the built environment. His master plans impart a sense of community and place, while establishing a framework for sustainable, cohesive growth. For more than 12 years, MGA has been the campus master planner for Rice University, resulting in approximately 27 building projects, including three residential colleges for the North Campus.

"Michael Graves has enhanced not just the architecture profession with his talent and scholarship, but everyday life itself through his inspiring attention to beautiful and accessible design," says Michael Lykoudis, Driehaus Prize Jury Chair and Francis and Kathleen Rooney Dean of the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. "The quality and scope of his work have enhanced how people work, live, and interact in public and private realms, making a profound impact on American life."

Established in 2003 through the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, the Richard H. Driehaus Prize honors lifetime contributions to traditional, classical, and sustainable architecture and urbanism in the modern world. The Driehaus Prize represents the most significant recognition for classicism in the contemporary built environment.

Recipients are selected by a jury comprised of Adele Chatfield-Taylor (President of the American Academy in Rome), Robert Davis (Developer and Founder of Seaside, Florida), Richard H. Driehaus (Founder and Chairman of Driehaus Capital Management), Paul Goldberger (Architecture Critic for The New Yorker), Léon Krier (Inaugural Driehaus Prize Laureate), Michael Lykoudis (Francis and Kathleen Rooney Dean of the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture), and Witold Rybczynski (Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania and Architecture Critic for Slate).

Michael Graves awarded the 2012 Driehaus Prize

2011-12-14T02:26:00.003-05:00

Image: Metropolis Magazine.

The South Bend Tribune has the early story (apparently released a day too soon, according to discussion on the TradArch listserv).

Graves is a strange choice for this award. He's more securely in the postmodernist rather than the classical camp--best known for his Portland Public Services Building, pictured above. It will be interesting to see who was on the jury and what reasons they gave for the selection of Graves.

Waste not, want not

2011-12-13T01:03:00.000-05:00

Old Urbanist has a post up on the surface area functions of the central cores of several U.S. cities. Divided into four categories (surface parking, parking structures/garages, parks, and streets), the images provide a vivid visual of wasted space in American cities. Most remarkable of the given images is Houston (though Little Rock is not far behind), where very nearly 2/3 of the city center's surface is given to car/transit handling. Washington D.C.'s number is 44%, but 97.5% of that comes from the city's wide streets--there are few surface lots in the center, unlike Houston's many open lots and garages. The difference between 44% and 64% is a lot in terms of perception. Central D.C., despite its wide streets accounting for nearly half of the surface area, feels fairly compact and built up.

OU suggests that 25% is an optimal number in terms of surface area given to car storage and traffic--a number close to that of Paris and Vienna.

The beauty of Gothic

2011-12-08T16:20:00.001-05:00

Contrasting forms at Peterborough Cathedral.

Grand Apple

2011-12-08T16:07:00.001-05:00

An Apple store moves into Grand Central Terminal. It's a totally minimalist design that rightfully defers to the grandeur of the space. Unobtrusive and smart.

Now if only the employees had elegant red jackets with black trim, that would be a statement.Something like the inverse of this (but black not blue):

Appreciating Perugino

2011-12-04T17:57:00.001-05:00

Pietro Perugino, Christ Entrusting the Keys of the Kingdom to Saint Peter, Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, 1482

3pipe has a post up on the critical fortunes of Pietro Perugino, the prolific late-quattrocento artist and master of Raphael. Perugino's reputation has suffered by constant comparison to Raphael, who was undoubtedly a much more sophisticated painter. This contrast was initiated by Giorgio Vasari, whose triumvirate of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo is still part of the bedrock of art historical surveys. But as Glennis McGregor points out, Perugino belonged "to a generation of painters who valued craft over originality." Raphael, by contrast, worked in a milieu that increasingly valued individual maniera and virtuosic display. In other words, the two artists occupied different artistic worlds and it hardly does justice to either to use the standards and expectations of one to judge the other. This is by now a well known caveat of art criticism, but it's often mighty hard to overcome.

Perugino's best known work is the fresco in the Sistine Chapel depicting Christ offering St. Peter the keys to the kingdom of Heaven. Ideologically, it's a heavy image, but its clarity of spatial composition and harmony of color makes it a masterpiece equally of the early classicism of the quattrocento and of the High Renaissance apotheosis of harmonious composition. According to McGregor, Perugino's most celebrated quality, in his own time, was "his ability to sink the beholder into contemplative states of mind" by means of his placid and controlled compositions.

McGregor's post also calls attention to Perugino's depictions of architecture at which he was quite adept. In the Entrusting the Keys, the baptistery in the center and the triumphal arches are rendered in precise and convincing detail, but many of his other works use more encompassing architectural constructs, such as loggias and porticoes, to contain and direct the expressive action of the image. The architectural settings are, like Piero della Francesca's and Sandro Botticelli's, integral elements of the perspectival construction of his pictures.

These architectural depictions hold much interest for the architectural observer, whereas the painting of Raphael rarely relies on such perspectival architectural effects--the biggest exceptions being his monumental frescoes in the Stanze of the Vatican, especially the Disputa and School of Athens, which seen together create a virtual early Christian basilica out of the room (the Disputa, pictured below, being the apse). But for architectural interest, Perugino edges out Raphael (if we count only painted depictions--Raphael, of course, was a practicing architect in Rome and his works there, including the Villa Madama and several palazzi, have been tremendously influential). I wonder what Perugino would have done had he had commissions to build.

Raphael, La Disputa, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican Palace, 1510

Lecture images on Renaissance architecture in Rome

2011-12-04T16:19:00.001-05:00

Tempietto in the Cortile of San Pietro in Montorio, Rome, by Donato Bramante, ca. 1502-08

Linked here is a pdf file of my PowerPoint presentation on early sixteenth-century Roman architecture from my Italian cinquecento art course this fall.

The travails of art

2011-12-03T23:17:00.001-05:00

Pablo Picasso, Seated Bather, 1930, Museum of Modern Art, New York

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Seated Bather, 1884, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA

Social Darwinism is back

2011-12-01T12:14:00.001-05:00

Robert Reich is right.

A miscellany of (potentially good) books, February 2012

2011-11-25T13:06:00.001-05:00

Some recent and forthcoming books, with occasional commentary:

The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of New York, edited by Hilary Ballon (Columbia University Press, 2012). Accompanying an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, this is the first book to trace the history and long-term effects architecturally, urbanistically, economically, and socially of the city's 1811 grid plan. Co-curator Hilary Ballon (who has written wonderfully about Renaissance Paris and Frank Lloyd Wright) is interviewed here:

Ballon is much more sanguine about the grid than the legions of its critics over the past two centuries. I'll have a review of the show and the book soon.

Designing Pan-America: U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere, by Robert Alexander Gonzalez (University of Texas Press, 2011).

Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America, by Joan Ockman (MIT Press, 2012).

Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Photographs, by Micheline Nilsen (Ashgate, 2011).

An American Palace: Chicago's Samuel M. Nickerson House, by David Bagnall (Driehaus Museum, 2012).

Writing about Architecture: Mastering the Language of Building and Cities, by Alexandra Lange (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012).

Rome: Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape, edited by Dom Holdaway and Filippo Trentin (Pickering & Chatto, 2013). A collection of essays looking at Rome through a postmodern lens. It will include an essay by the always informative Eamonn Canniffe, "A Travelogue of Imagined Rome," and what sounds like an interesting article by Richard Hayes entitled, "Las Vegas, by Way of Rome: The Eternal City and American Postmodernism."

Bernini: His Life and His Rome, by Franco Mormando (University of Chicago Press, 2011). The first full biography in English on this most important 17th-century artist. Much like Caravaggio, the primary sources on Bernini's life are very limited. The preface promises that the book will be more than a discussion of Bernini's art, but the lack of sources makes me skeptical. Presumably, the religious, political, and social contexts of 17th-century Rome will loom large in the narrative.

Venice and Vitruvius: Reading Venice with Daniele Barbaro and Andrea Palladio, by Margaret Muther D'Evelyn (Yale University Press, 2012). Coming close on the heels of Deborah Howard's Venice Disputed: Marc'Antonio Barbaro and Venetian Architecture, 1550-1600 (Yale, 2011), this latest book looks at the other Barbaro brother associated with Palladio and architecture in the Veneto.

Venice from the Water: Architecture and Myth in an Early Modern City, by Daniel Savoy (Yale University Press, 2012). Yale Press seems to be busy churning out Venetian titles lately.

Raphael's Poetics: Art and Poetry in High Renaissance Rome, by David Rijser (Amsterdam University Press, 2012).

Speaking Ruins: Piranesi, Architects, and Antiquity in Eighteenth-Century Rome, by John Pinto (University of Michigan Press, 2012).From the publisher's description: "Pinto offers case studies of important architectural and archaeological sites in and around Rome, such as the Trevi Fountain and the ancient Italian cities of Pompeii and Paestum. Speaking Ruins emphasizes the close relationship between the intensifying archaeological explorations in this period especially in Rome and vicinity, but also in Greece and the Levant and the development of post-Baroque styles in architecture, shading gradually into Romanticism and Neo-Classicism."

The Art of Building in the Classical World: Vision, Craftsmanship, and Linear Perspective in Greek and Roman Architecture, by John R. Senseney (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Senseney examines a difficult and largely overlooked aspect of antique architecture: the use of design drawings. "Senseney focuses on technical drawing in the building trade as a model for the expression of visual order, showing that the techniques of ancient Greek drawing actively determined concepts about the world. He argues that the uniquely Greek innovations of graphic construction determined principles that shaped the massing, special qualities, and refinements of buildings and the manner in which order itself was envisioned."

Princeton and the Gothic Revival, 1870-1930, by Johanna C. Seasonwein (Princeton University Press, 2012).

From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism, by Alina Payne (Yale University Press, 2012). Renaissance architectural historian looks beyond the sixteenth century to examine how "the eloquence of architectural ornamentation was taken on by objects of daily use."

Robert and James Adam, Architects of the Age of Enlightenment, by Ariyuki Kondo (Pickering & Chatto, 2011). An intellectual history of these important architects and a move away from the formalist-dominated study of neoclassicism.

Rethinking the High Renaissance: The Culture of the Visual Arts in Early Sixteenth-Century Rome, by Jill Burke (Ashgate, 2012).

Writing the Modern City: Literature, Architecture, Modernity, edited by Sarah Edwards and Jonathan Charley (Routledge, 2012).

Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China, by Xuefei Ren (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Despite the awkward subtitle, the book promises to be a major contribution to the vital study of contemporary architecture in relation to political economy.

High Rise: Idea and Reality, edited by Karin Gimmi, Andres Lepik, and Andres Janser (Hatje Kantz, 2012).

Turkey: Modern Architectures in History, by Sibel Bozdogan and Esra Akcan (Reaktion, 2012), and Italy: Modern Architectures in History, by Diane Ghirardo (Reaktion, 2012). The latest titles in the series, these concise books offer panoramic views of modern architecture in national contexts.

Campus Guide: University of Virginia, by Richard Guy Wilson, Sara A. Butler, and David J. Neuman (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). A new edition of this guide, originally published in 1999, which is useful for its succinct and reliable history of Jefferson's Academical Village.

The Aztecs, 3rd edition, by Michael E. Smith (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Smith is a rigorous scholar of comparative urbanism and culture in the ancient world, focusing especially on Mesoamerica. I have used his articles for student readings in two of my courses because he writes clearly and passionately. His output is truly staggering (can it all be good?). This new edition of his comprehensive study of the Aztecs is updated with recent archaeological findings and theoretical insights and a slew of new photographs.

Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, edited by Ilona Katzew (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2011). This is the catalog of the well received exhibition at LACMA. I suspect the book is very good--but if I may nitpick, why the sans-serif font for the main title? It doesn't seem to work, does it? I've noticed the Getty using a similar title font in recent books, but it's not a trend I would like to see continue.

Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit, by Anna O. Marley (University of California Press, 2012). A long overdue assessment of Tanner's art.

Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740-1840 (Yale University Press, 2012). Although it gets overlooked today, Philadelphia was a major early American cultural center. Its residents seemed to pursue natural philosophy with a special zeal, which forms the subject of this book.

City of Gold and Mud: Painting Victorian London, by Nancy Rose Marshall (Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, 2012). An endlessly fascinating topic on this city of dramatic contrasts.

The Secret Cabinet: Corot's Figure Paintings and the World of Reading, by Mariantonia Reinhard-Felice (Hirmer Publishers, 2012).

Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, edited by Isabelle Loring Wallace and Jennie Hirsh (Ashgate, 2011).

Wealth, Power, and the Crisis of Laissez Faire Capitalism, by Donald Gibson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Living with Books, by Dominique Dupuich, photographs by Roland Beaufre (Thames & Hudson, 2012).

Books: A Living History, by Martyn Lyons (Getty Museum, 2011).

ABCs of architecture

2011-11-23T20:55:00.001-05:00

Anna Shepard, The ABC of City Planning (New York: Mayor's Committee on City Planning, 1937)

A unique view of urban planning and architectural ideas from 1937 (as presented by New York's Committee on City Planning under Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia), this children's book distills urban thinking of the period into snippets of rhyming poetry. Scanned and offered online by the Citizens Housing & Planning Council.

Jane Jacobs on narrow streets

2011-11-23T14:15:00.001-05:00

Bedford and Barrow Streets, Greenwich Village

A brief collection of Jacobs' insightful remarks on the merits of narrow streets. It is the character of the pre-grid street, along with the kinds of buildings and functions lining it, that makes Greenwich Village, for instance, so alluring (and expensive).

Shaming the pepper-sprayer

2011-11-23T13:15:00.001-05:00

Some of them are inventive. Picasso's Guernica, below, and the Escher, above, are very well done. More here.

Quote of the day

2011-11-21T17:38:00.001-05:00

"Architecture is a threshold through which we pass into the possibility of being human."

~Marvin Trachtenberg, Building-in-Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion

Another view of Jane Jacobs

2011-11-16T14:51:00.001-05:00

A follow-up to the recent post--Sharon Zukin looks at Jacobs' economic program for urbanism.

Architectural musing

2011-11-16T14:39:00.001-05:00

Courtyard of the school of Santa Felicita, Florence.

The arcade as communal, celebratory link, like the joining of hands in a circle.

Roberta Gratz on Jane Jacobs

2011-11-16T09:58:00.001-05:00

Here.

Che liberazione!

2011-11-12T16:20:00.001-05:00

Ciao, Silvio.

Celebration at Piazza del Quirinale, Rome. From repubblica.it.

A reminder, from Ingrid Rowland, of what we're saying goodbye to.

Barricading lower Manhattan

2011-10-23T17:59:00.000-04:00

Image from crytome.org.

Walking in New York's Financial District has become even less pleasant than usual. Since 9/11 barricades around the Stock Exchange have marred the intersection of Wall and Broad Streets as well as feeder streets surrounding the building. Since Occupy Wall Street began there have been additional barricades. The photo above shows the view down Wall Street, approaching the intersection with Broad; Federal Hall with the statue of Washington is to the left, the Stock Exchange is to the right.

The police have even gone to the extraordinary measure of guarding the bull at the start of Broadway at Bowling Green:

Image from TheAtlantic.com.

Wall Street, Broad Street, and surrounding areas are no longer public spaces. They are effectively martial zones with a heavy police presence and very restricted pedestrian and vehicular access:

Image from cryptome.org.

The barricading of Lower Manhattan is indicative of the corporate assault on the public realm, abetted in this case by city authorities.

A dispatch from Rome

2011-10-19T12:00:00.001-04:00

A post in the New York Review blog from Ingrid Rowland, who teaches in Notre Dame's architecture program in Rome, on the ugliness of recent protests in the Eternal City. The image above is a sad one of a clash between police and the small but violent segment of the protesters known as the Block Bloc. The battle field is the piazza in front of Saint John in the Lateran, the seat of the Pope as Bishop of Rome, with sculptural figures of Christ, St. John, St. Augustine, and other church fathers and saints looking down, seemingly impotent, distant observers. Some of the non-violent protestors took shelter in the church's portico and in the side entrance, sheltered, Rowland notes, "underneath Francesco Borromini’s sublime Baroque arches."

Rowland notes that the history of violence in this part of the city from Nero to the present. She ends with a powerful critique:

The spoiled kids who took over their [otherwise peaceful] demonstration are the direct descendants of the young men in tights who ran riot in Verona in the days of Romeo and Juliet: the Mercutios and Tybalts of our era, people who have never had to make anything in their lives and therefore have no idea what it means to create even a small thing like a window, a planter box, a store, a tree, a home, a work of art, a human hand, a face. With their sovereign sense of privilege and their frantic amassing of weapons, clothing, and technological gadgetry they are, in their own way, as much an expression of the rampant consumer capitalism they claim to deplore as the bankers they claim to be slaying on behalf of the rest of us.

Quote of the day

2011-10-16T03:23:00.001-04:00

"Happy is he who, free of prejudice, recognizes the merits of the Ancients and the Moderns, appreciates their beauties, and acknowledges and forgives their mistakes."
~Voltaire ("Anciens et modernes")

Is this a lost (suppressed?) element of the zeitgeist of modernity? Dan Edelstein thinks it was the "defining attitude of the Enlightenment." Can it still be today?

A miscellany of (potentially good) books, September 2011 edition

2011-09-18T22:49:00.000-04:00

I offer another selection of recent and forthcoming books that I'd be happy to make room for on my shelves. This selection is predominantly architectural, including quite a few works on Italian topics.

First, some Chicago/American titles:

Edward W. Wolner, Henry Ives Cobb's Chicago: Architecture, Institutions, and the Making of a Modern Metropolis (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Finally a monograph on an important but long under-studied Chicago architect. He designed one of the most delightful confections on Michigan Avenue, the Chicago Athletic Association Building, pictured on the cover.

Wanda Corn, Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition (University of California Press, 2011). A strange play in the title on the Women's Building designed by Sophia Hayden at the Fair, but it seems Corn is arguing that the art displayed in said building constituted a history of women's achievement and a kind of roster of progress and optimism for future opportunities. (Corn seems to have a penchant for odd book titles: The Great American Thing is another--a good book but a mystifying title).

David Van Zanten, Marion Mahoney Reconsidered (University of Chicago Press, 2011). An important architect often overshadowed by Walter Burley Griffin and Frank Lloyd Wright, for whom she provided some of the best watercolors and drawings of the early twentieth century, as well as being an accomplished designer in her own right.

Richard Nickel and Aaron Siskind, The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan (Richard Nickel Committee, 2010). A lavish volume cataloging all the work of the partnership and of the architects individually. Richard Nickel was an architectural photographer who was killed when a stairwell collapsed inside Sullivan's Chicago Stock Exchange Building while he was documenting its demolition. The book is as much a tribute to his efforts toward preservation and documentation, narrated in They All Fall Down, as it is to Adler & Sullivan's wonderful, humane form of modernism.

Igor Marjanovich and Katarina Ruedi Ray, Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg's Urban Vision (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010). A distinctive sight along the Chicago River, Marina City's two towers are, if not exactly handsome, certainly hard to ignore. There's also a new monograph, Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention (Art Institute of Chicago, 2011). Goldberg has enjoyed a revived reputation since his death in 1997, and these two books attest to the continuing high-water mark in the reevaluation of his legacy in Chicago.

And beyond Chicago:

Marvin Trachtenberg, Building in Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion (Yale University Press, 2010). A book about a subject that is central to architecture but sorely lacking in most studies of it--the temporal dimension. Here, Trachtenberg suggests that premodern architects consciously designed and built with this dimension in mind, while modern architects, expanding on Alberti's theory, have tried to expunge the temporal from the art of building.

Caspar Pearson, Humanism and the Urban World: Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance City (Penn State Press, 2011). I'm very excited about this title--but the high price is exasperating. The description says it presents a "revisionist" history of Alberti's ideas about urbanism and that, in fact, he was not the urban idealist he's often made out to be. A provocative claim that requires some major rereadings of his writing. Interesting news in relation to Pearson's thesis: an Italian scholar has recently claimed that Alberti is the artist behind at least one of the three mysterious "ideal city" paintings in collections in Urbino, Berlin, and Baltimore. From the description it seems this new book is about Alberti's theory more than it is about his actual built work, so the question of the relation between his theory and practice, and what the possible authorship of the paintings reveals relative to both, is still open to debate.

Heather Hyde Minor, The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome (Penn State University Press, 2010). There's not much in English on eighteenth-century architecture in Rome, except, of course, for the glorious Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain. Minor's contextual analysis of the intellectual climate of the Roman elite and their architects should make for fascinating reading about the dynamic interplay of new building, restoration, and the historical heritage of the city.

Deborah Howard, Venice Disputed: Marc'Antonio Barbaro and Venetian Architecture, 1550-1600 (Yale University Press, 2011). Last year Howard published a major co-authored book on music and architecture at San Marco and other Venetian churches in the Renaissance. Here she focuses on the aristocrat and diplomat Marcantonio Barbaro and his deep involvement in sixteenth-century architectural projects, including his relationship with Andrea Palladio, who built the Villa Barbaro and the charming Tempietto at Maser for Sig. B. and his brother, Daniele.

James H. Johnson, Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic (University of California Press, 2011). From the description: "Johnson offers a spirited analysis of masking in this carnival-loving city. He draws on a wealth of material to explore the world view of maskers, both during and outside of carnival, and reconstructs their logic: covering the face in public was a uniquely Venetian response to one of the most rigid class hierarchies in European history. This vivid account goes beyond common views that masking was about forgetting the past and minding the muse of pleasure to offer fresh insight into the historical construction of identity."

Paolo Liverani, Giandomenico Spinola, and Pietro Zander, The Vatican Necropoles (Brepols, 2010). The subterannean world of the Vatican is endlessly fascinating and mysterious--one of the densest palimpsests in a city that is substantially defined by the term.

Caroline Bruzelius and William Tronzo, Medieval Naples: An Architectural and Urban History, 400-1400 (Italica Press, 2011). Naples has been getting its art historical due lately (in the English language, that is). It's good to see something on its pre-baroque history, which is very sparsely represented in English.

Rebecca Zorach, The Passionate Triangle (University of Chicago Press, 2011). The triangular compositions of Leonardo and Raphael are staples in introductory classes in art history. Here Zorach deepens our understanding of this compositional technique and symbolic element in Renaissance painting.

Mary D. Garrard, Brunelleschi's Egg: Nature, Art and Gender in Renaissance Italy (University of California Press, 2010). High praise from art historian Mieke Bal: "Brunelleschi's Egg constitutes an exemplary feat of interdisciplinary study that requires no specialized theoretical baggage to follow and emulate." And CUNY art historian (and a former professor of mine) James Saslow writes, "In this sweeping study, the magnum opus of one of feminist art history's founding mothers, Mary Garrard extends the gendered critique of art into the realms of philosophy and science, psychology and myth. Her eloquently prophetic and richly detailed synthesis chronicles western culture's increasing feminization of nature and art, and its parallel masculinization of the human mind (both male and female), as a Renaissance tragedy on an epic scale. The book is a must-read for historians of the early modern period, with a theme also of urgent contemporary concern."

Charles M. Rosenberg, ed., The Court Cities of Northern Italy: Milan, Parma, Piacenza, Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Urbino, Pesaro, and Rimini (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Frances Ames-Lewis, ed. Florence (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Both volumes are part of the Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance series from Cambridge. As a whole, the series is a thorough, up-to-date introduction to the people, themes, and places of the Italian Renaissance. While the volumes don't include enough color images (which is especially important in the cases of artworks that have not been widely published), the bibliographies are quite thorough resources. Florence, of course, is the most studied place of the Renaissance, but I think the new book is still valuable as a one-volume summary of the entire history of the Florentine Renaissance, incorporating recent research (including, one hopes, such new perspectives as brought forward by Michael Cole in his excellent recent book, Ambitious Form: Giambologna, Ammanati, and Danti in Florence). The volume on the court cities is very welcome as a fresh look at some relatively overlooked cities such as Pesaro and Piacenza. Hopefully in the works is a volume or two on southern Italy, a region rarely given much attention until the seventeenth century (but see the note on Naples above!).

Hans Belting, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). Belting, whose Likeness and Presence is a classic work on the meanings of images before modern notions of art came into being, presents the history of perspective in Renaissance art as an encounter with Arab mathematics, and explores its various theological implications in the respective Christian and Islamic societies.

Mark A. Peterson, Galileo's Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts (Harvard University Press, 2011). Peterson advances a very provocative thesis: artists, poets, and musicians helped Renaissance science become "modern," more than the scientists themselves. According the description, Peterson argues that "the recovery of classical science owes much to the Renaissance artists who first turned to Greek sources for inspiration and instruction. Chapters devoted to their insights into mathematics, ranging from perspective in painting to tuning in music, are interspersed with chapters about Galileo's own life and work. Himself an artist turned scientist and an avid student of Hellenistic culture, Galileo pulled together the many threads of his artistic and classical education in designing unprecedented experiments to unlock the secrets of nature." In our own time, which perpetuates a deep division between the artistic and the scientific, reminders about their historical affinities are much needed. And with some scientists in advanced physics interested in a unified theory of the universe, such speculations about the origins of modern science might even prove to be catalysts for useful experiments and new approaches.

Thomas Barrie, The Sacred In-Between: The Mediating Roles of Architecture (Routledge, 2010). A phenomenological-religious perspective on sacred architecture--too often obscured by political and social readings of religious buildings.

Florian Urban, Tower and Slab: Histories of Global Mass Housing (Routledge, 2011). Although it is one of the modern world's ubiquitous urban forms, mass housing has had varied impacts in wildly different contexts. A global, comparative approach as this book promises seems well suited to understanding both the universality implied by this building type and the varying local realities this architecture has had to address (or, sometimes it seems, has tried to ignore).

Judith McKenzie, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, 300 BC-AD 700 (Yale University Press, 2011). A survey of a relatively unexplored architectural topic in the English literature--Egypt between the end of the ancient kingdom and the start of the Islamic era. The Pelican series is a bit uneven in quality, but it has some classics (Wittkower, Blunt, etc.) and the subject of this particular volume was in much need of a good synthesis.

Slobodan Curcic, Architecture in the Balkans: From Diocletian to Suleyman the Magnificent, 300-1550 (Yale University Press, 2010). The Balkan peninsula north of Greece has long been an obscure presence in English-language art history due to its chaotic history: the region has a multiplicity of languages and religions as well as constantly changing political borders and allegiances. This 600-pager promises to be a good overview of its medieval and Renaissance architecture, about which I know little, even though my dad is from Zagreb. Shame on me! Happily, the book is a sign of an emerging interest in the region--a recent volume on select aspects of the art history of Croatia (John Julius Norwich, ed., Croatia: Aspects of Art, Architecture, and Cultural Heritage), and some attention to Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovenia (beyond the well-known early 20th-century master Jozep Plecnik) are all welcome.

Zhongjie Lin, Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan (Routledge, 2010). Though not at all my cup of tea when it comes to architecture, the Metabolists gave us a strange and fascinating chapter of twentieth-century modernism.

Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (Zone Books, 2011). Well received in a recent issue of TLS, the book presents an argument for the material basis of medieval Christianity, with special focus on relics, reliquaries, revealing the complex understanding of corporeality and matter before the advent of early modern science.

Oscar Wilde, edited by Nicholas Frankel, The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). As 3PP noted, we now have three versions of Dorian to contend with: "the magazine version, the novel version, and the new version. . . . Dorian 1890, Dorian 1891, and Dorian 2011." Whatever the difficulties of the present volume, it's a good excuse to reread this classic.

Searching for Leonardo's Anghiari

2011-09-18T18:57:00.002-04:00

Peter Paul Rubens. Copy of an engraving after Leonardo da Vinci's cartoon for the Battle of Anghiari. Ca. 1603, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

A very interesting post from 3PP on the latest developments in the efforts to find Leonardo da Vinci's original fresco of the Battle of Anghiari in the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence. On one hand it all seems a bit extravagant, on the other it would certainly be an amazing find if the original were located and possibly revealed.

"Remember Them," Oakland, CA

2011-09-11T14:10:00.001-04:00

A very interesting memorial in Oakland, CA, offers a lesson in how representational sculpture and modernist experimentation can be beautifully synthesized.

Some words on 9/11

2011-09-11T13:16:00.002-04:00

Lynn Becker at ArchitectureChicago offers some interesting words in praise of the art installation in response to 9/11 that, until 9/12/2011, occupies the risers of the main stairs at the Art Institute of Chicago. A. and I saw this installation by artist Jitish Kallat at Christmas last year, and while colorful, I found it underwhelming. It's not that the message it attempts to convey is unworthy or uninspiring. Quite the opposite, in fact. The words present a portion of the brief text of the celebrated, impromptu speech given by the Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda at the Parliament of the World's Religions held in conjunction with the Columbian Exposition in 1893. Here's the key passage of that speech: "Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now."

The artist has stated the following about the Art Institute installation:

Now his speech is illuminated, conceptually and actually, in the threat coding system of the United States Department of Homeland Security. I find it interesting how the advisory system co-opts five colours from a visual artist’s toolbox into the rhetoric of terror, by framing them as devices to meter and broadcast threat much like its predecessors, the British BIKINI alert state and the French vigipirate. Treating the museum’s Grand Staircase almost like a notepad, the 118 step-risers receive the refracted text of the speech. I see Public Notice 3 as an experiential and contemplative transit space; the text of the speech is doubled at the two entry points on the lower levels of the staircase and quadrupled at the four exit points at the top, multiplying like a visual echo.

I applaud the sentiments behind this work. The Swami's words continue to inspire hope for a peaceful future. But the words are also bittersweet given our knowledge of subsequent history between 1893 and today. When he spoke those words in 1893, the U.S. was not yet considered a major military power; this would change with the 1898 Spanish-American War. The specter of the two World Wars was not quite visible on the horizon, and the threat of total annihilation by nuclear war could not have been contemplated. The optimistic words of Swami Vivekananda expressing hope for the "death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons," was not to be.

The failure of the staircase installation to inspire is a result of its lofty sentiments and political message being mismatched to its format and location. The artist's idea of the stairs as a "contemplative transit space" just doesn't work. Because the speech was given at the Art Institute, it would be appropriate to be reminded of this within the museum. However, a staircase is a singularly bad location for such a reminder. There are certain parts of buildings that are not very congenial to political messages, and there are other parts which almost beg for them. A staircase, it seems to me, is usually an example of the former. A staircase is usually a functional apparatus within a building, as it is in the case of this main staircase at the Art Institute. This particular staircase has two purposes: the most important is to be tread upon, albeit while providing an elegant visual and experiential means of going up or down. Its second purpose is to provide a visual focus when one enters off Michigan Avenue into the relatively dark, low entrance hall of the museum; directly ahead one is drawn to the brightly lit, glass-roofed cortile and its stairs.

I suppose it was the latter purpose that inspired the artist and museum to consider the stairs an appropriate place for the installation. Unfortunately, it is difficult to read the words continuously, not only because you have to dodge people coming and going, but also because of the height of the stairs. The constant changing colors, too, make an absorptive reading almost impossible. The words chosen don't just declare a political position or provide a critique of social norms, they also express one of the loftiest, idealistic hopes of humanity. They deserve reflection and discussion. Reading them off the risers of a busy staircase doesn't provide much opportunity for either.

The other element of Becker's post has to do with the Freedom Tower (now, mercifully, called officially One World Trade Center) and other architectural responses to 9/11. He notes accurately that "the constructions arising out of 9/11 are mostly about fear." I haven't yet seen the sunken twin fountain memorials in person, but judging (unwisely) from images and descriptions, they seem like they do a good job of providing a contemplative experience for the visitor thanks to their vast scale (they follow the footprints of the Twin Towers). Blair Kamin has some good words on the memorial, and links to those of a few other architecture critics.

If only the buildings surrounding them were something more than corporate glass behemoths. The forms of architecture are always ambiguous and difficult to make "speak." Yet I'm sure you can easily call to mind examples of architectural form that manage to convey meaning eloquently and beautifully. Nothing of the sort has even been attempted here. The buildings are mute and banal, the result of real estate speculation and little more. They contribute nothing to the streetscape and communicate nothing worthy to the beholder.

Herbert Croly on our malaise, part 2

2011-08-17T15:20:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I quoted Herbert Croly's diagnosis of political malaise. Today, I have a quote from his important book, The Promise of American Life (1909), considered one of the major statements of the Progressive Era.

In this excerpt (p. 150 of most editions), Croly critiques what he sees as the underlying conservatism of the reform impulse in his time. Replace "reformers" with "moderates" (which includes many Democrats) and especially with "Tea Partiers" and the trenchancy of the critique is revealed to be still powerful today.

Reformers have failed for the most part to reach a correct diagnosis of existing political and economic abuses, because they are almost as much the victim of perverted, confused, and routine habits of political thought as is the ordinary politician. They have eschewed the tradition of partisan conformity in reference to controverted political questions, but they have not eschewed a still more insidious tradition of conformity — the tradition that a patriotic American citizen must not in his political thinking go beyond the formulas consecrated in the sacred American writings. They adhere to the stupefying rule that the good Fathers of the Republic relieved their children from the necessity of vigorous, independent, or consistent thinking in political matters, — that it is the duty of their loyal children to repeat the sacred words and then await a miraculous consummation of individual and social prosperity. Accordingly, all the leading reformers begin by piously reiterating certain phrases about equal rights for all and special privileges for none, and of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Having in this way proved their fundamental political orthodoxy, they proceed to interpret the phrases according to their personal, class, local, and partisan preconceptions and interests. They have never stopped to inquire whether the principle of equal rights in its actual embodiment in American institutional and political practice has not been partly responsible for some of the existing abuses, whether it is either a safe or sufficient platform for a reforming movement, and whether its continued proclamation as the fundamental political principle of a democracy will help or hinder the higher democratic consummation. Their unquestioning orthodoxy in this respect has made them faithless both to their own personal interest as reformers and to the cause of reform. Reform exclusively as a moral protest and awakening is condemned to sterility. Reformers exclusively as moral protestants and purifiers are condemned to misdirected effort, to an illiberal puritanism, and to personal self-stultification. Reform must necessarily mean an intellectual as well as a moral challenge; and its higher purposes will never be accomplished unless it is accompanied by a masterful and jubilant intellectual awakening.

This final thought is, I think, critical for us today. We have, in some quarters, a moral fervor for change and reform, but it has not been accompanied by a "masterful and jubilant intellectual awakening."

Herbert Croly on our malaise

2011-08-16T12:52:00.001-04:00

Today, liberals and progressives are dispirited. Their disenchantment stems primarily from disappointment with President Obama and Congressional Democrats' seeming inability to fight the right-wing onslaught on public welfare.

We’ve been here before. Herbert Croly’s 1920 article, “The Eclipse of Progressivism,”¹ diagnosed a similar disenchantment after the disappointments of President Wilson, who had taken up the mantle of progressive leader.²

Here, then, are a few of Croly’s words, which seem to me to have much to say about our situation 91 years later. Substitute Obama for Wilson and the relevance is clear.

The chief distinguishing aspect of the Presidential campaign of 1920 is the eclipse of liberalism or progressivism as an effective force in American politics. . . . [T]he voters with progressive opinions are confused, scattered, distracted and impotent. The Democratic candidate is bidding for their support; but his bid is low and, considering the record of his party, of more than doubtful cash value. It attracts few former progressives except those who are Democrats first and progressives second. On the other hand the Republican candidate not only dares to defy progressivism by being unmistakably reactionary, but he is counting on his partiality for private business and his renunciation of any meddling with it in the public interest to win the election for him. It is this fact which most clearly betrays and proves the contemporary political impotence of progressivism. . . .

Progressivism or liberalism is fundamentally the attempt to mould social life in the light of the best available knowledge and in the interest of a humane ideal. It lives by the definite formulation of convictions, by the initiation of specific programs and by the creation of opportunities to try them out. It is necessarily aggressive. In order to be successfully aggressive it must know what it wants; it must know how to get what it wants; and it must be willing to make the sacrifices which are necessary for the success of its aspirations and plans. The various progressive groups are no longer sure or clear about what they want. They do not know how to get what they want; nor are they willing to pay the price. Their political futility is born of the equivocal meaning of American liberalism, its failure to keep abreast of the best available social knowledge and its inability to interpret candidly the lessons of its own checkered career.

The Roosevelt progressive party was an extremely composite political camp-meeting. It included not only every shade of liberalism but almost every degree of conservatism. It sheltered millions of Mr. Roosevelt's personal followers who never possessed any sincere or intelligent grasp of progressive principles. . . . But too often he beguiled rather than convinced his converts, and they soon fell away from him or he from them. The party never possessed any body of common conviction or of economic impulse sufficient to preserve its members from backsliding during the intervals between camp meetings. Mr. Roosevelt himself by his behavior before and during the convention of 1916 took away from the remnant of the party its integrity of principle. He was willing to sacrifice essential progressive interests and convictions to the satisfaction of an intense personal animosity to the President and the Democratic party. The result was to pass on to Mr. Wilson the temporary leadership of American progressivism. The mass of progressive voters rallied to the support of the Democratic candidate as the most promising way out of a 'bad business. But they never entirely trusted him and his party. Nor did they accept without substantial qualifications his formulation of progressive principles. He finally justified these misgivings. By his behavior since the armistice he, like Mr. Roosevelt, forced his progressive supporters to choose between their loyalty to their principles and their loyalty to him. He shattered what was left of American progressivism as a coherent body of conviction. The hodge-podge of factions and sects which remain of the progressive movement know neither their own minds nor the dangerous world in which they live.

__________
1. Herbert Croly, "The Eclipse of Progressivism," The New Republic, 27 October 1920.
2. For an excellent summary of Croly's political theory as a synthesis of liberal and republican strands, see Kevin C. O'Leary, "Herbert Croly and Progressive Democracy," Polity 26, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 533-52.

On and off the grid

2011-08-11T15:10:00.000-04:00

The Manhattan that wasn't. A projection from a 1782 British map of Manhattan showing possible street development absent the 1811 Commissioners' Plan.

Two interesting posts about grid planning and New York City.

Pruitt-Igoe

2011-08-02T00:00:00.002-04:00

This looks to be a good film documenting the development and destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis in the context of larger urban and social changes in the 1950s through 70s.

If you're in Chicago, it will be showing soon at the Gene Siskel Film Center, according to ArchitectureChicago.

The original green

2011-08-01T01:08:00.002-04:00

Over at Dear Polia, my architect friend Nadia has a fascinating post on what we might call authentically "green" technology--a form of low technology that is not gimmicky but actually grows organically out of a local ecology. She calls attention to a coffee estate in Nicaragua, Selva Negra, which seems to epitomize this approach to sustainability.

It's not that the urban green roofs she mentions as discussed on NPR are bad things. It's just that such solutions really do almost nothing to solve the big-picture problem. Big, dense cities have their own ecologies. Part of that ecology is about concentrating consumption and waste. Unfortunately, when urbanism turns into sprawling suburbanism, the relative containment of consumption-waste is spread out along with the development. And when we turn cities into low-density places by privileging cars over public transportation, biking, and walking, among other anti-urban measures, we pretty much nullify the economies of scale present in good urbanism in terms of the consumption-waste balance.

Zurich: "Boring and Bourgeois"

2011-07-31T23:21:00.001-04:00

But don't take those adjectives as pejorative. According to Alain de Botton, the city is a place "where the public realm exudes respect in its principles and architecture, and where the need to escape into a private domain is therefore less intense. Citizens will lose some of their ambitions for personal glory when the public spaces and facilities of a city are themselves glorious to behold. Simply being an ordinary citizen can seem like an adequate destiny."

Speaking of Rome...

2011-07-26T22:31:00.000-04:00

A video from architect Tom Rankin on the role of traditional architecture in the modern city. I might want to press him on his understanding of what "mimetic" architecture is and why he thinks "it would be wrong environmentally, economically, and aesthetically" to destroy a building that is "out of style" but yet thinks we should not build new work employing traditional means.

Even so, he provides a very reasonable perspective, as a modernist, vis-à-vis modernist dogma. His blog, too, is worth checking out for his posts on the history and urbanism of the city.

The phenomenological monotony of typing

2011-07-24T13:02:00.001-04:00

The drive to end cursive instruction moves ahead, now in Indiana, as another part of the imprudent business-efficient model of education, to be replaced by typing.

Typing is much faster, and the shape of the individual letters doesn’t matter to the pressing of buttons. A five-letter word comes about through five actions that are barely distinguishable (instead of pressing here with an index finger, you press 1/4 inch to the right with a middle finger . . .). And you can type while looking somewhere else, too. It’s faster, more efficient, less focused on the form of each letter, less absorbing of attention.

We might ask, however, whether those very virtues of keyboard writing are less conducive to basic literacy learning than handwriting (not just cursive, but print, too). Here is an article in the journal Advances in Haptics entitled “Digitizing Literacy: Reflections on the Haptics of Writing,” by Anne Magnen and Jean-Luc Velay, that examines the cognitive differences between handwriting and keyboard writing that suggests those difficulties of the former deliver specific mental benefits.

The authors single out a few crucial distinctions.

One, in handwriting eyes and hands focus upon the same thing, the letter in formation. With typing, eyes and hands focus on different things (screen and keys, respectively), producing “a distinct spatiotemporal decoupling between the visual attention and the haptic input.” (“Haptics” is the science of “tactile perception and active movements.”) Two, the hand-writer has to “graphomotorically” form each letter, while the type-writer works with ready-made letters and only has to find the right space for it. This makes typing more “phenomenologically monotonous” than handwriting.

While phenomenological simplicity and a separation (or liberation) of the eyes from the point at which a pencil touches a page well suit ordinary activities in the workplace or in leisure life, in learning situations, they may pose a disadvantage. There, the goal isn’t to produce writing products, but to develop basic literacy. Activities that appear inefficient in out-of-school contexts aren’t necessarily so in elementary school classrooms.

A miscellany of (potentially good) books

2011-07-23T13:51:00.001-04:00

Some recent and forthcoming books that I look forward to having on my shelves in the future.

Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome. David Franklin and Sebastian Schutze. National Gallery of Canada/Yale University Press, 2011. Caravaggio's been a hot topic lately--good to see that his followers are getting their due.

Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War. Jean-Louis Cohen. Editions Hazan, 2011. Cohen is a determined modernist historian from the IFA, but he knows his stuff well.

A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-siecle Art. Alison Syme. Penn State Press, 2010. The description of this book is tantalizingly mysterious ("ideas of cross-fertilization and the hermaphroditic sexuality of flowers"). This can either be a heavy, forced theoretical interpretation, or an elegant and captivating humanistic meditation. We'll see.

The Eighteenth-Century Church in Britain. Terry Friedman. Paul Mellon Centre, 2011. Very well reviewed in the TLS.

Things American: Art Museums and Civic Culture in the Progressive Era. Jeffrey Trask. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Civic culture is right up my alley (my dissertation deals with this topic in this period).

Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History. Robert Hughes. Knopf, 2011. Hughes is an entertaining art critic, so whatever he has to say about Rome should be worthwhile.

The New Painting of the 1860s: Between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement. Allen Staley. Paul Mellon Centre, 2011. Fascinating period and art. Should make for good conversation with my friend and Pre-Raphaelite expert, bklynbiblio.

Inigo Jones: The Architect of Kings. Vaughan Hart. Paul Mellon Centre, 2011. Inigo Jones and his relationship to classicism was the subject of two recent books. Another seems like overkill, but the emphasis on his hostility to certain forms of Italian classicism and pre-Jones connections between the Crown and classicism make it worthwhile.

Reconsidering Jane Jacobs. Max Page and Timothy Mennel. American Planning Association, 2011. Like Caravaggio, commentary on Jacobs has been a industry unto itself lately. Hopefully some unique perspectives are to be found here.

Asterios Polyp. David Mazzucchelli. Pantheon, 2009.

Democracy and Public Space: The Physical Sites of Democratic Performance. John Parkinson. Oxford University Press, 2011. This promises to be a very valuable addition to democratic theory and its intersections with architecture and urbanism. It's also immensely relevant to my dissertation.

The Heroic City: Paris, 1945-1958. Rosemary Wakeman. University of Chicago Press, 2009. A reevaluation of postwar Paris, seeing vibrancy in its social life even as its physical fabric was beginning to be devastated.

Paris Dreams, Paris Memories: The City and Its Mystique. Stanford University Press, 2011.

The Enlightenment: A Genealogy. Dan Edelstein. University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Frederic Howe's wisdom for today

2011-07-22T22:47:00.002-04:00

Behind the Republican insanity over the debt ceiling, behind their entire economic philosophy so far as I understand it, is a belief that personal qualities are the foundation of capitalist enterprise. This is one of the cardinal tenets, then, of neoliberalism, which is the postmodern form of capitalism. This ideology of personal qualities assumes that, on the whole, personal initiative and personal character traits are largely responsible for an individual's success or failure in the marketplace.

The left, since the Progressive Era, has rejected this view. A powerful early voice against this determinism was Frederic C. Howe. In his classic book from 1905, The City: The Hope of Democracy (which I've just read for my dissertation research), Howe wrote the following:

It is our institutions and our laws, not a divine ordinance or the inherent viciousness of mankind, that are at fault. Our evils are economic, not personal. Relief is possible through a change in our laws, in an increase in the positive agencies of government, and the taxing for the common weal of those values which are now responsible for much of the common woe. It is not personal goodness that is demanded so much as public intelligence. For the worst of the evils under which America suffers are traceable to laws creating privileges.

"Public intelligence" is not a quality associated with politics generally, but it should be plainly obvious now that Republicans--neoliberals and Tea Partiers above all--are ideologically opposed to this concept. They do not, in fact, appeal to the public worth of anything except for defense and a few basic services. Theirs is an ideology of total privacy, which in fact denies the wisdom of the entire liberal (small l) tradition going back to John Locke and Adam Smith, which very forcefully and eloquently depended on a conception of "public intelligence" very similar to Howe's. This public intelligence ensures respect for privacy by insisting upon fairness in the public realm.

The position of the right on the debt ceiling and the deficit is fundamentally dishonest: the federal government does not have a defecit because it spends too much on social programs. It has a deficit because we have concocted a structurally unbalanced economy and legal system in which very large corporations and financial institutions as well as very wealthy individuals are nearly totally shielded from any obligation to the commonweal.

Chicago's latest public art installation

2011-07-19T21:56:00.000-04:00

A 26-foot tall statue of Marilyn Monroe is now on (temporary) display at one of the most prominent sites in the city--in the near the plaza in front of the Tribune Tower near the Michigan Avenue Bridge. She's up on a podium that looks like a street vent, so viewers get an eye-full of her undergarments as she tries, unsuccessfully, to keep her skirt down in her famous coquettish pose from The Seven Year Itch.

As a Chicago critic points out, it's all a bit icky and provides a too-good-to-pass-up outlet for some very juvenile behavior (licking her legs, pointing fingers between the legs . . . you get the picture).

Oro ergo sum

2011-07-19T16:05:00.002-04:00

A fascinating essay on the "argumentative theory of reasoning," which is attractive compared to what we might call the "truth-finding theory of reasoning." The author writes,

Almost all classical philosophy—and nowadays, the “critical thinking” we in higher education tout so automatically—rests on the unexamined idea that reasoning is about individuals examining their unexamined beliefs in order to discover the truth. The “argumentative theory of reasoning” upends this philosophical cart by proposing that reasoning is actually a tool to help with arguing—that arguing, not truth, is the point of it all. The theory jibes nicely with evolutionary psychology, which sees reasoning as yet another step in the development in human communication that enhanced the social side of human existence and put the human competitive urge to good use. . . . Reasoning, even if flawed in any given instance, works in an overall way to improve the reliability of what speakers say, and what listeners hear. It helps groups as a whole decide what is the best course of action.

Now, of course, such a study is not the last word on the debate (no irony intended). And the author is a bit too pessimistic, I think, in her final judgment:

If the argumentative theory of reasoning takes hold, it will destroy more than critical thinking. It’ll take down the whole edifice of Western thought–including Aristotle’s ideas about man possessing a rational principle, and Descartes’ famous “Cogito ergo sum,” which flattened that principle with the cudgel of experience. The new purpose of reasoning will not be to discover truth, but to argue in groups. What a depressing advance in the history of thought.

Worthy thoughts from a landscape designer

2011-07-18T12:49:00.000-04:00

From Charles Birnbaum, asking architecture critics to "evolve, already"!

Book review: John King, Cityscapes: San Francisco and Its Buildings (2011)

2011-07-16T22:40:00.003-04:00

King has given us a short book covering fifty San Francisco buildings, some of them unsung heroes in the symphonic richness of the city's urban fabric. Unfortunately, the very brief descriptions do not add up to any coherent understanding of the urbanism or the architectural history of the city--there's very little here about cityscape in any broad sense. This is a book for occasional perusal, but other architecture guides must be consulted for detail and breadth.

Some of King's choices of buildings for inclusion are debatable: 450 Sansome Street is attended to mainly for its 2007 addition of a "scalloped ground-level foyer of aqua-green glass topped by an aluminum canopy resting on lithe diagonal struts." Unfortunately, the accompanying image gives poor indication of this feature, and the building itself is a dud--the author's insistence that the new canopy gives the viewer a chance to admire the building's "grace notes" of embossed metal panels "that gleam in the sun" hardly compensates for its overall crass banality. Further, the description and photos, like most in the book, give no sense of the urban context. We don't learn how the building meets the ground, what's next to it, or how its plan relates to the block and street. For a book titled Cityscapes, this is an unforgivable sin.

The introduction starts the whole affair off on a sour note. King laments those who would try to preserve the historical character of the city, likening them unfavorably to Prince Charles. Then, apropos of nothing, the author writes, "The clash of styles and scales and materials can be invigorating--urban diversity at its best--so long as the new arrivals are marked by the essence of enduring architecture: begin with a clear vision and then bring it to life with loving care." This sounds less like a reasonable definition of the "essence of enduring architecture" than it does a banal program for modernist art education. Nothing there about architecture's contribution to the city. Instead, architecture is the result purely of the designer's ability to bring a "vision" to life. And the conception of diversity once again as a "clash" is tiresome--what about in varietate concordia? I think we need to establish a lexicon of words and phrases for architectural writers to avoid: "clash of styles," "expresses its time," "innovative," and other such abused and often empty terms would top my list.

Book review: Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class (2010)

2011-07-16T18:55:00.002-04:00

Chris Hedges has compiled a damning critique of the failure of liberalism. To echo another review (on LibraryThing), the book is a fiery philippic denouncing the timidity and hypocrisy of liberal elites. Though Hedges never defines liberalism or who exactly constitutes the "liberal class," it's clear that he sees liberalism as the conscience of modern society and that the downfall of liberals as a distinct class holding broadly progressive political and intellectual convictions began with liberals' misplaced patriotism and consequent support of Woodrow Wilson's propagandizing during World War I. This role as modern conscience is key to both liberalism's vitality and its original sin: it is an engine for social good (equality and liberty) but it is also inherently intertwined with the nodes of power of the modern world--state and corporate (which he sees, rightly, as ever more closely intertwined as we approach our own day).

Liberalism is a vast political and social terrain, and Hedges would have improved the clarity and precision of his arguments if he had provided a clearer sense of who constitutes the liberal class and who is outside it. This is not an academic book so it is not surprising that he doesn't offer a closer parsing of the huge literature on liberalism. Still, an attempt in the introduction or elsewhere early on would have helped guide the reader to a clearer understanding of the particular traditions of political and social thought he engages. Related to this ambiguity, Hedges is far too fond of long quotes and many sections seem strung together with only a modicum of original writing.

Hedges, though, is damning of much post-war liberal culture: Abstract Expressionism, 60s counterculture, academe, and much more all come under his relentless guillotine. I agree with much--probably most--of what he says. The problem is that this seems to be a compilation (of admittedly important criticisms) more than a sustained argument about the systemic causes of liberalism's decline and it offers little in the way of solutions. Such gloomy works--valuable and potent, certainly, and deserving of a broad audience--recall the earlier commitment of Marxist scholarship and the blistering language of the Populist demagogue or the righteous preacher. Although I think he gets the critique of the sins of corporate liberalism basically right, his all around gloomy picture doesn't offer much hope. In that, he is different from one of his idols, Noam Chomsky, whose equally trenchant eviscerations of liberal cooptation and hypocrisy usually manage to offer a hopeful note.

The art-speak of Colbert

2011-07-16T15:55:00.002-04:00

Stephen Colbert has been remarkably consistent with his art-speak. He and his writers know how to either deflate the excesses of theory-driven art-speak or make an important political statement using such language. Sometimes he does both at the same time. Which is it here? What he says in this segment does actually make sense, but it's said with a sense of irony and wit that also pokes fun at the seriousness with which some art writers imbue their arcana.

"This is canvas as theater of existential warfare. An insurgency of the voiceless subaltern."

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The pre-industrial aesthetic of Harry Potter

2011-07-16T15:29:00.000-04:00

From Matters of Taste (the whole thing is a delightful read--below is the thesis):

Rowling’s descriptions of the environments in which her stories are set are terrifically engaging, as are their cinematic representations. But it’s not just the storytelling that draws in readers; it’s the particular quality of the world on which she reports: one with a clear aesthetic preference that even Muggles can understand, since it is part of their history, too. It is a direct echo of the forward-yet-backward-looking taste that bubbled up in England for a few decades starting around 1850. Backward in that it intentionally ignored many, if not most, of the period’s technological innovations, forward in its democratization of art-making. This is the movement that slips back and forth between a new appreciation for medieval art and architecture, the invention of a bold polychromatic Gothic revival, and the blossoming of the Arts and Crafts.

What these related-but-distinct ideas have in common is their rejection of the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Revolution and abhorrence for its poofy “Victorian” consumption and taste, and their value for art and design that manifests of the unique qualities of individual human spirits.

St. Pancras Reopens

2011-07-08T22:55:00.002-04:00

Simon Jenkins has a good article in the Guardian on the reopening of the St. Pancras Hotel in London.

Jenkins notes that its architect, Sir George Gilbert Scott, is the most "preserved" British architect--he has 607 protected structures. The runner-up is the great Edwin Lutyens with 402. Neither architect is well known in the U.S. but both are deserving of wider fame. Simon Bradley's book on St. Pancras, in Mary Beard's Wonders of the World series, is worth a read.

Jenkins effortlessly eviscerates anti-Victorianism: "All architecture is a pastiche of something, none more so than today's 'neo-modernist' revival. Scott was wholly up to date in his use of such materials as steel, concrete, plate glass and the technology of steam. He even put a modern bathroom on each floor at St Pancras. But he understood the spiritual exhilaration of the vertical line, the pointed arch and the soaring turret. In an age of relentless novelty, he understood that architecture could reassure people, that buildings could perform new uses yet offer comfort in continuity."

(The "spiritual exhilaration of the vertical line"--what a wonderful contrast to Nicolai Ouroussoff's idea of "oppressive perpendicular lines" in an abysmal review of his recently deconstructed by yours truly here).

I'm not convinced that what Scott offered was either reassurance or continuity. This idea that Victorian architects reassured the public (itself vague--reassured them of what?) by employing historical styles, even when such a theory is espoused by a sympathetic observer like Jenkins, seems a bit off base. The 19th century was a time of immense transformation--in many basic and dramatic ways (urbanization, capitalist hegemony, mass industrialization, explosion of bourgeois society, etc.) it marked the end of the "traditional" world and the beginning of the modern world. Architecture was involved in a fitful soul-searching about how to respond to this upheaval. The diversity of Victorian architecture seems more like a reflection of the diversity of responses to modernity rather than some kind of reassurance or mark of continuity. No one seeing a Gothic arch, or a Doric capital, would have been fooled then any more than we are now that they (or we) are living in other than modern times.

Jenkins also mentions Scott's Albert Memorial--certainly the most audacious and spirited monument in London. Rather ludicrous as a monument to Prince Albert's more temperate life, but it certainly packs a visual punch (if only its siting were more propitious):

The Dog Days of Summer

2011-07-06T22:19:00.007-04:00

It is almost beyond belief that we've come to this point, though maybe, given the ever-intensifying rabid insanity of Republicans, it was inevitable: we now have serious people (i.e., anyone not associated with Fox News) talking of the possibility of an impeachment trial against President Obama. It would be initiated by the House of Representatives should Obama pull the trigger on the so-called "constitutional option" if he and Congress don't reach a deal to raise the debt ceiling by August 2.

There's been a lot of left-wing chatter about this "constitutional option" the past few days. As I understand it, the relevant section of the Constitution (surprisingly, to me) states quite forcefully that the U.S. shall not allow default on its loans.

Section 4 of Amendment 14 (ratified in 1868) states, "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void."

The phrase "shall not be questioned" is the crux of the matter, it seems. A fascinating historical lesson by Jack Balkin explains why it became an issue in the first place--not surprisingly, it was a North-South debate after the Civil War. Balkin concludes, "The threat of defaulting on government obligations is a powerful weapon, especially in a complex, interconnected world economy. Devoted partisans can use it to disrupt government, to roil ordinary politics, to undermine policies they do not like, even to seek political revenge. Section Four was placed in the Constitution to remove this weapon from ordinary politics."

In another remarkable, historically-rich post today, he follows up:

"I believe that section 4 was designed to prevent what the Republican leaders of Congress are currently doing. Members of Congress should stop trying to use the risk of default to hold the country hostage in order to win concessions on ordinary matters of politics. The should simply increase the debt ceiling to match appropriations that Congress has already made. Then they should have negotiations about taxes and federal spending.

In the press and in the public commentary, however, the issue has been repeatedly posed as whether or not the debt ceiling is constitutional under section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

This is the wrong question.

We have had a debt ceiling in this country for a long time. Imposing a ceiling on the amount of debt the United States can take on does not by itself violate the Constitution. Quite the contrary, doing so is an exercise of Congress's powers under Article I, section 8.

Rather, the correct question is whether either the President or Congress, or both, are acting in a way to call the validity of the public debt into question. . . .

The duty imposed by section 4 of the Constitution exists whether or not a court could order either Congress or the President to act. There are many constitutional duties that no court can order either the President or members of Congress to perform. This may well be one of them. Congress is doing pretty much what the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment did not want them to do. But it is not clear that anyone has standing to force Congress to live up to its constitutional duty. . . .

This is the right way to think about what would happen if the country was really about to default, and the Treasury had exhausted all possible options under the current debt ceiling. Under these circumstances, the President would authorize the issuance of new debt if he believed that it would stabilize the situation and prevent default and economic catastrophe.

Without Congressional authorization, this action would be of very dubious legality. Indeed, without subsequent authorization, it would be illegal. As I read the Constitution, only Congress has the power to authorize new debt. But in extreme circumstances the President would do so anyway, arguing, like Lincoln, that Congress can approve what he does after he does it. But it would be essential that he did so publicly and did not try to hide what he was doing under a cloak of Presidential authority or national security. (This is the problem of the George W. Bush Administration. This Administration also justified its actions in the name of emergency, but it asserted a right to act in secret without any authorization at all, and the debate over retroactive authorization began only after it was found out.).

In this extreme case, the President acts because no one else will act, but in so acting he puts himself at the pleasure and mercy of Congress.

He says, in effect: 'This is what I have done to save the country. If you approve of it, then it is legal. If you do not approve, you may impeach and convict me. But now you must choose what to do. The responsibility is yours.'

This is a very dangerous game to play. Even when they are open about what they are doing, Presidents should not act like this unless there is absolutely no alternative. That is because this gambit, once begun, may be come habitual. Presidents may start to violate the law in private, hoping that no one will notice what they have done (Again, see the Bush Administration). Congress can become lazy or cowardly and simply wait for the President to do all the work and take all the risks. We should not be so eager to expand the President's power to act unilaterally, no matter how noble the cause, for the next President may not be one we like as well and the cause pursued far less praiseworthy."

Some liberals are being more cavalier about it, trumpeting the "extraordinary circumstances" card, and insisting that Obama could act unilaterally and just might emerge stronger at the end of an (unsuccessful, they assure us) impeachment trial (it certainly would go nowhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate, but the Republican House would very likely vote to impeach and call a trial. In the event Democrats lose the Senate in 2012, all bets are off).

Others, like Joan Walsh, recognize that the Republicans believe they come out on top no matter what: "The debt-ceiling vote has been a routine Congressional process for a long time; it happened seven times under George W. Bush with little or no protest. Now the GOP has made it an occasion to take the economy hostage, knowing that the consequences of default are so high – much more interest on the debt we owe, an inability to borrow more, plus draconian government program shutdowns – the president may be unable to win their game of chicken. The way the game looks now – and it is a game to the GOP – they win, whatever happens."

I have no desire to prognosticate what may transpire over the next month or so, but I'm wary about the outcome. I'm also weary of the politicking of it all, just like a writer at the Economist blog admits. It will end in one of two ways: either with a major capitulation by the president to the demands of the rabid, irresponsible Republicans, throwing the domestic budget under the bus to coddle the super-wealthy, or with a constitutional crisis (and another economic one, too) on our hands. As for the first option, the New York Times reported the following today:

"The president’s renewed efforts follow what knowledgeable officials said was an overture from Mr. Boehner, who met secretly with Mr. Obama last weekend, to consider as much as $1 trillion in unspecified new revenues as part of an overhaul of tax laws in exchange for an agreement that made substantial spending cuts, including in such social programs as Medicare and Medicaid.

The intensifying negotiations between the president and the speaker have Congressional Democrats growing anxious, worried they will be asked to accept a deal that is too heavily tilted toward Republican efforts and produces too little new revenue relative to the magnitude of the cuts.

Congressional Democrats said they were caught off guard by the weekend White House visit of Mr. Boehner — a meeting the administration still refused to acknowledge on Wednesday — and Senate Democrats raised concerns at a private party luncheon on Wednesday."

The dog days of summer are indeed upon us.

Michael Kimmelman To Replace Ouroussoff

2011-07-05T22:27:00.004-04:00

Following up on my last post in which I wondered about the exit of New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff: Blair Kamin has just posted the internal memo from the Times announcing Michael Kimmelman will take over the post "in the fall." (Apparently Ouroussoff will be with us till then). The memo is in full below. I have not read Kimmelman's pieces regularly, but his wide interests and varied background seem to be unusual for an architecture critic. That background is promising for his critical perspective, I think, since it means Kimmelman comes unburdened with the "insider's" perspective.

From the Times: "For the past four years, as critic, foreign correspondent and inventor of his signature 'Abroad' column, Michael Kimmelman has produced groundbreaking stories from Gaza, Kurdish Turkey and Syria, London, L’Aquila and Stockholm. He has written about the Hungarian far right, Holocaust education for a new generation in Germany, the pieds noirs in Southern France, bullfighting, and the lingering appeal of Soviet-style Bulgarian wit. Some of it was about Culture, meaning the disciplines we cover in our sections. All of it was about culture as a window into ideas — politics, society, economics, conflict and identity.

So it seems only natural for Michael to take on an assignment that should be just as expansive; he’ll be our next chief architecture critic. Michael’s abiding interests, as he puts it, have been 'in how we live, in how buildings actually work, in city planning, public policy, neighborhoods, communities and characters, in architecture as a complex and contradictory discipline, a true generalist’s profession and synthetic art.'

He’s a native New Yorker who notes how growing up in the West Village made him 'instinctively aware of the tenuous and evolving life of cities, and of people’s stake in how cities change.' This, he adds, 'was when Ada Louise Huxtable was the paper’s groundbreaking and inspired architecture critic.'

Around here, he has long been a marquee byline. He started at The Times a few years out of school as a freelance music critic in the late 1980s and swiftly morphed into an art critic at the encouragement of the chief critic at the time, John Russell, who learned that he had been trained as an art historian.

He became chief critic in a flash and one of the paper’s great writers. There are way too many examples to cite here, but ask yourself: Before Michael, how many art reviews appeared on Page 1, let alone reviews of contested public art projects written on deadline like this one?

As for architecture, you may recall among other things his recent Times Magazine profiles of Oscar Niemeyer, Shigeru Ban and Peter Zumthor, his pieces in The New York Review of Books about Frank Lloyd Wright and the New York baseball stadiums, and this dispatch about the restoration of an old museum in Berlin. His writings in the field go back to his days between Yale and Harvard as a fledgling editor at ID Magazine and architecture critic for The New England Monthly.

Michael will start his new job in the fall, after he moves back from Europe with his family. And because it is neither wise nor possible to confine someone like Michael inside the border of any single discipline, he will continue to write Abroad columns and Postcards with the new title of senior critic.

It’s a lot to look forward to."

Zaha Strikes Again

2011-07-05T21:29:00.002-04:00

What an exhilarating new airport terminal:

Wait, my producers are telling me this is not an airport. It's...an opera house?

Predictably--really, this business is so old now--Nicolai Ouroussoff lavishes praise upon it. Wasn't he supposed to be off in seclusion writing a book by now? He's apparently on a trip through China to fawn over the latest confections there; his previous review glowingly hailed Steven Holl's Vanke Center as a "legitimate architectural masterpiece."

Since he's still with us, my way of reading an Ouroussoff review is still in effect: completely invert everything he says. What he praises is probably reproachable, what he condemns is probably praiseworthy. Not 100% foolproof, but pretty close.

Zaha Hadid's opera house is the latest evidence of China's strident architectural theatrics. China, according to Ouroussoff in his review of Holl's building, is "the world’s great incubator of architectural ideas: the place where architects are free to explore some of their most outlandish fantasies." I'll grant him that last part, but I don't think it's something to celebrate.

Ouroussoff tends to write in starkly dichotomous terms: every building he reviews seems to be either a roaring success of cosmic proportions or a thundering catastrophe that signals the downfall of the profession. Yet, paradoxically, he often writes with a cool detachment that is the opposite of his predecessor's histrionic vitality.

The alleged earth-shattering greatness of Hadid is at play in this review. To magnify the importance of this new building, he mentions Hadid's winning entry to the competition for an opera house in Cardiff, Wales, more than a decade ago as a defining moment of her career. This was shattered when "the project was eventually handed over to a lesser talent — an outcome that was devastating for Ms. Hadid and a blow to architectural history."

Now, a blow to architectural history it was not. The destruction of Rome, or Istanbul, or, say, the historic center of Beijing--those truly would be blows to architectural history. Of course, with Beijing this has happened--and it's not that Ouroussoff isn't aware of this: his 2008 article on preservation in Beijing was one of his best.

Unfortunately, that article is an exception. More typical is this one on Hadid, which is chock full of his worst habits, including his off-hand abuses of classicism: "[Hadid's] design here is never static; there isn’t the oppressive sense of control found in some classical architecture, with its rigid perpendicular lines." Does a comparison with classicism--an immensely diverse and expressive tradition--really fit here? Is he thinking of the Parthenon? the Pantheon? John Soane's Bank of England? Michelangelo's dome at St. Peter's? the baroque churches of Latin America? Borromini's Sant'Ivo? It's hard to see what he has in mind here. Then there's that facile connection of oppression with perpendicular lines...this is surely a joke...or the opinion of a novice unfamiliar with the phenomenology of architecture.

He ends with the following: "In some ways China resembles Italy just after the turn of the last century or Russia in the 1920s — countries whose faith in modernity was driven, in part, by insecurities over their own relative backwardness. Seen in that light, the Guangzhou Opera House is a monument to a particular crossroads in China’s history, as well as to Ms. Hadid’s stellar career."

What is the "particular crossroads in China's history" that Hadid's building commemorates? He doesn't say. How awful if we were to conclude the following: China's government is repressive and statist, and with a vengeance it has replaced socialist authoritarianism with neoliberal capitalism. A monument to such a crossroads must be a queer sort of monument.

Durable Construction: The Material Basis of Classicism

2011-07-04T14:09:00.013-04:00

A video (shot in front of the Notre Dame architecture school) showing the (mostly) manual construction of a jack arch according to traditional methods:

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Travis Kline, featured in the video, was part of my 2003 graduating class in architecture at Notre Dame. Nice job, Travis!

I hope that exercises such as this become part of the curriculum at Notre Dame (and elsewhere). The arch was constructed last month for the Palladio conference at the university, well after the end of the school year, so it was unfortunately detached from the normal life of the school. Hands-on construction and building experience was a key area lacking in the curriculum while I was there--it's one thing to read a textbook about it, it's quite another to learn to do it by hand. Even a simple task such as building a jack arch illuminates the materiality and tectonic aspects of architecture as no other way can. And it's certainly one good way to get closer to the spirit of Palladio, who first apprenticed as a stonemason in Padua and Vicenza and knew better than almost anyone else how to manipulate the tectonics of architecture for expressive ends.

How Venice Works

2011-07-02T18:06:00.002-04:00

A new website, Venice Backstage, reveals the infrastructure and public works of the world's most spectacular city. The video on the site's home page is a great introduction to the Venetian urban system and well worth a watch. It visually demonstrates just how complex and precarious is the Venetian infrastructure.

Blowing Smoke . . . and Architectural Irresponsibility

2011-06-28T13:01:00.003-04:00

You know you're in for a depressing architecture review when the first two sentences are these:

"For some time now China has been the world’s great incubator of architectural ideas: the place where architects are free to explore some of their most outlandish fantasies. And more and more, that freedom seems to be giving rise to an architectural renaissance, one that is producing legitimate architectural masterpieces."

And it gets worse:

"Its jagged form, propped up above a tropical park on piers up to 50 feet high, gives identity to a characterless landscape. It demonstrates what can happen when talented architects are allowed to practice their craft uninhibited by creative restrictions (or, to be fair, by the high labor costs of most developed societies)."

Guess who wrote it?

Art in Public

2011-06-27T12:07:00.000-04:00

At Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Larry Shiner reviews Art in Public: Politics, Economics, and a Democratic Culture by the philosopher of aesthetics Lambert Zuidervaart. In 2004 Zuidervaart published Artistic Truth which sought to reinstate questions of artistic truth into contemporary debates and criticism. In his new book, Zuidervaart wades into the public art debate, especially as it pertains to the culture war clashes over government funding of the arts and public art's perceived roles (both left and right) in society.

Shiner writes the following:

"Zuidervaart has made a genuinely original contribution to current debates. Of course, his approach, especially his left-leaning positions on economic and political theory, is not going to convince conservative opponents of government funding. Nor are his criticisms of individualism and vanguardism likely to please many in the contemporary high art community, where the old shibboleths of the sovereignty of the artist and a preference for 'transgressive' gestures are still in force. Many artists, curators, critics, and theorists would rather enjoy the frisson of seeing themselves as victims of an uncomprehending and hostile world than grapple reflectively with the complex issue of art's proper role in society."

From its description and Shiner's excellent exposition of the book's arguments, I too hold out little hope that contemporary critics and art historians will engage these issues more seriously and move beyond the "transgression" paradigm. Yet for anyone who thinks with John Dewey or Hannah Arendt, as I do, that any part of our social world that leads us away from democratic structures and institutions--that is, structures and institutions which foster a fellow-feeling and sense of participatory duty--is a strike against democracy, Zuidervaart's book seems to provide confirmation and new ways of thinking and arguing.

Unfortunately, the center of the contemporary art world is far from this view. But Shiner insists that Zuidervaar offers an alternative: "We can no longer regard art as something which is purely individually produced and consumed; rather we need 'a post individualist, non-privatist, and communicative framework.'" Art critics may see this as conservative or reactionary, but they wear modernist blinders. Zuidervaar's perspective fits well, I think, with a progressive agenda that seeks to offer an alternative to the excess of privatism and hegemonic individualism of the current economic-social order (as advanced, mostly unknowingly, by the Tea Partiers and economic libertarians, too). Any book that helps us articulate that is worth a read.

Nomination for Most Hyperbolic Statement on the Significance of Picasso and Braque's Cubism...

2011-06-22T23:15:00.001-04:00

Pablo Picasso, Violin and Grapes, 1912

From Big Think, in response to an exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum: "Picasso and Braque scaled the mountain of Western art tradition and then turned the mountain upside down through their artistic gamesmanship that took every aspect of what we knew of art up to then and made it look like child’s play."

Meh.

Renovatio Urbis Romae

2011-06-21T23:30:00.003-04:00

Cortile della pigna at the Cortile del belvedere, Vatican, by Donato Bramante

High on my wishlist of recent books is Nicholas Temple's Renovatio Urbis: Architecture, Urbanism and Ceremony in the Rome of Julius II. Eamonn Canniffe has a brief review, which certainly whets the appetite.

It seems the perfect complement to another recent book, David Karmon's The Ruin of the Eternal City: Antiquity and Preservation in Renaissance Rome.

Theatricality of the Renaissance City

2011-06-20T01:20:00.000-04:00

A good paper by Eamonn Canniffe exploring this well-known theme through a case study of the Piazza Ducale in Sabbioneta.

The Internet and the Brain, Part 58,397

2011-06-18T15:20:00.000-04:00

From Nicholas Carr:

"A new study provides evidence that heavy internet use by the young results in 'brain structural alterations' of a kind associated with 'impairment of cognitive control.' The study, published this month in PLoS ONE, was conducted in China, where approximately 14 percent of urban youths - some 24 million kids - are believed to suffer from so-called 'internet addiction disorder.' Using brain scans, the researchers compared the brains of 18 adolescents who spend around eight to twelve hours a day online (playing games, mainly) with the brains of 18 adolescents who spend less than 2 hours a day online. The heavy Net users exhibited gray-matter 'atrophy' as well as other 'abnormalities,' and the changes appeared to grow more severe the longer the kids engaged in intensive Net use."

Does Modernism Drive Us Crazy?

2011-06-16T22:06:00.003-04:00

Hospitals, anyway, seem to think modernist art raises stress levels in patients:

"Hospital rooms painted in soft earth and ocean tones, instead of stark white or intense primary colors, have been found to lower anxiety levels while improving mood and promoting relaxation. Studies also show that art depicting landscapes or ocean scenes is calming as opposed to abstract art, which can be stressful and disturbing for patients."

Has modernist art contributed to our late-modern malaise rather than just reflected or interpreted it? I think most critics will reject the former, but if we take phenomenology seriously (as I think we should), there's no reason not to think that art, though maybe less than architecture, is a contributing factor to well-being. If we believe that it can help heal--and the flourishing of art therapy says that we do--then why can't it cause psychic harm, too?

Of course, this is not to say we need to decorate our living rooms with Thomas Kinkade paintings . . .

Ephemeral Urbanism, Exhibit A

2011-06-16T11:58:00.006-04:00

The Fifth Avenue Apple Store will be rebuilt, just five years after it opened and at approximately the same cost.

Not only that, according to records "the design of the cube was trademarked last year to prevent anyone from copying the structure, and store lease documents indicate if Apple were to move, they would take the cube with them." Of course, it's probably folly to even expect that a glass retail store would want to contribute to the permanence and stability of the great worldly artifact we call the city.

Festival of the Architecture Book

2011-06-12T20:35:00.004-04:00

If you're in Chicago or will be traveling there over the next few months, a number of events are planned at area institutions to celebrate the illustrated architecture book: it's the 500th anniversary of the publication of the first illustrated edition of Vitruvius' Ten Books of Architecture by Fra Giocondo (title leaf above).

This Gets You a Pritzker?

2011-06-12T17:32:00.001-04:00

Two weeks ago President Obama lauded Pritzker Prize-winning Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura. Obama had some rather forgettable and clichéd things to say about architecture, including his celebration of Chicago as a kind of architectural utopia. He said, "If you love architecture there are few better places to live than in my hometown of Chicago. It is the birthplace of the skyscraper. A city filled with buildings and public spaces designed by architects like Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry."

Fine so far. The bit about the birthplace of the skyscraper is clichéd pseudo-history, but it's part of the mythology of Chicago and it's relatively harmless. I'd hardly count Gehry, though, as among the great Chicago architects--his only work there, the Millennium Park stage, is eye-catching and popular, but that hardly puts him on par with the importance of Sullivan and Wright.

But he goes on:

"In fact, the headquarters of our last campaign was in a building based on a design by Mies van der Rohe. And for two years, we crammed it full of hundreds of people working around the clock and surviving on nothing but pizza. (Laughter.) I'm not sure if that's what Mies had in mind, but it worked out pretty well for us.

And that's what architecture is all about. It's about creating buildings and spaces that inspire us, that help us do our jobs, that bring us together, and that become, at their best, works of art that we can move through and live in. And in the end, that's why architecture can be considered the most democratic of art forms.

That's perhaps why Thomas Jefferson, who helped enshrine the founding principles of our nation, had such a passion for architecture and design. He spent more than 50 years perfecting his home at Monticello. And he spent countless hours sketching and revising his architectural drawings for the University of Virginia -- a place where he hoped generations would study and become, as he described it, 'the future bulwark of the human mind in this hemisphere.'

Like Jefferson, tonight's honoree has spent his career not only pushing the boundaries of his art, but doing so in a way that serves the public good. Eduardo Souto de Moura has designed homes, shopping centers, art galleries, schools and subway stations--all in a style that seems as effortless as it is beautiful. He's an expert at the use of different materials and colors, and his simple shapes and clean lines always fit seamlessly into their surroundings."

His definition of architecture ("buildings and spaces that inspire us, that help us do our jobs, that bring us together") and his connection of this "art that we can move through and live in" as the most "democratic" of art forms is numbingly banal fluff from someone whose speechwriters obviously know little about architecture. I'm fairly certain Obama himself could have come up with something better.

Unfortunately, architecture has nothing intrinsically to do with democracy; it only does should we choose to make it so. Architecture's service to democracy has, of course, been limited to those historical moments when democracy flourished, by no means the largest chunk of history. Jefferson, surprisingly our only great builder-president (Washington built, but not much), took the Renaissance architect Palladio as his ultimate guide when designing the original version of Monticello (somewhat less so in the second, permanent version) and there was nothing democratic about Palladio's buildings or his patrons in the sixteenth-century Veneto. Those buildings did have a public impact, but it was not about democracy. Still, this is all relatively harmless if misinformed architectural history.

What bothers me about Obama's remarks are his casual attitude to "public good" and his praise of the architect's "simple shapes and clean lines [that] always fit seamlessly into their surroundings." Rather than explaining what an architect's obligations are to the public good, Obama simply praises the architect's formal manipulations and assumes that is enough to create a harmonious fabric with a building's surroundings.

I happen to like a few of Souto de Moura's buildings, like this stadium in Braga:

This kind of modernism works best outside of urban cores. But then there are things like this office complex in Burgos, an odious piece of anti-urbanism:

And this museum proposal for Venice:

Now, I'm probably making too much over one very short speech that doesn't really matter and will have no effect whatsoever on the architectural profession, or on architectural criticism, or on the public's understanding of architecture. Still, it's depressing to hear talk like this from someone who knows something about urbanism--he knows Jane Jacobs and his work as an organizer in Chicago surely taught him a thing or two about planning.

Ouroussoff's Out

2011-06-11T22:13:00.002-04:00

This past week news was leaked of the departure of New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. In a bit of real irony, the internal memo, as reported by the A/N Blog, states that Ouroussoff will "write a book about the architectural and cultural history of the last 100 years, 'from Adolf Loos’s Vienna and the utopian social experiments of post-revolutionary Russia to postwar Los Angeles and the closing years of the 20th century,' as Nicolai describes it. . . . There’s a ton of Nicolai’s trademark ambition in the plan for his book, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which aspires to put a century of architecture into the kind of social and political context he always aimed for within the more limited constraints of newspaper writing."

Perhaps I blinked and missed it, but what social and political contexts did he write about?

For the most part Ouroussoff, perhaps even more than his goofy but entertaining predecessor Herbert Muschamp, championed the aesthetic theatrics of the neo-avant-garde and wrote about architecture in a vacuum, particularly an urbanistic vacuum. Ouroussoff's concerns were never stated more forthrightly than in this article from 2009, in which he laments the loss of a "heroic," artistic modernism. Speaking of the New York Five, especially Peter Eisenman, he wrote with gleeful approval that they "elevated conceptual ideas above material and structure, the life of the mind over the life of the body." Architecture for Ouroussoff was not about reality, "material and structure," the ways in which a building or space impacts the public life of a city or neighborhood, but about theory and aesthetic novelty. He asserts, "The country’s creative energy [in the 1980s] shifted westward, to Los Angeles, whose vibrant mix of urban grit and nature, abundance of relatively cheap land and lack of confining historical traditions allowed architects to experiment with a freedom that had become virtually impossible in New York." For Ouroussoff, the fewer the limits on the conceptual stirrings of architects' egoistic impulses the better.

That 2009 piece also contains what is probably the most fatuous portrayal of Jane Jacobs to come from the pen of a major critic. He wrote that "activists like Jane Jacobs were portraying modern architecture as the product of smug, pointy-headed academics out of touch with the way real people live. Her vision of the ideal city--a historical community of brownstones, front stoops and corner stores--was modeled on the North End in Boston and Greenwich Village. It left little room for new architectural ideas." Here he manages to get Jacobs wrong and provide exhibit B for my critique.

Romney the Despicable

2011-06-11T20:13:00.003-04:00

Colbert cuts through the crap about Romney the Great Businessman.

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Apple's "iSpaceship"

2011-06-10T18:56:00.001-04:00

Word from Steve Jobs the other day about plans for Apple's new headquarters in Cupertino, California. Blair Kamin did a short post about it, though he didn't really provide any commentary, except to say "When it comes to good design, Apple doesn't scrimp." I suppose he's a fan of the company's glassy stores. Not sure what to make of this "spaceship" except the usual anti-urban "corporate campus" bit. Why is it impossible for a company like Apple to locate into a downtown?

"Mr. Jobs said the iSpaceship would have a smaller footprint but house more people than existing buildings accommodate on the 150-acre site. He vowed to rip up surface parking lots and replace them with landscaping, nearly doubling the number of trees on the site to 6,000. He said the site would have an energy center where Apple would generate its own electricity and use the grid as backup. . . . And it will have huge panels of curved glass all around. 'There is not a straight piece of glass in this building,' Mr. Jobs said."

So, the interiors will need high-tech cooling systems to counteract all that specially-made glass. Not quite the epitome of eco-friendliness. This is just a megabuilding with a sleek outer shell on a suburban site papered over with easy nods to environmentalism. I'd be much more impressed if Apple relocated to, say, Oakland and helped spur responsible corporate reinvestment in that city.

And should the fact that Apple is a megacorporation escape our minds:

"Mr. Jobs, a Cupertino native, seemed to know that with Apple as the city’s largest taxpayer and employer, he isn’t likely to face much resistance. When another council member asked whether Apple would provide free Wi-Fi in Cupertino (as Google has done in its hometown of Mountain View, nearby), Mr. Jobs appeared in no mood to bargain. 'I’ve always had this view that we should pay taxes and the city should do those things,' he said. 'If we can get out of paying taxes, I’ll be glad to put up WiFi.'"

In other words, give us our permits, shut up, and be grateful we didn't leave town.

The Odious Silvio Berlusconi

2011-06-04T20:04:00.001-04:00

If American political theater of late isn't sleazy and dispiriting enough, there's always the Italy of Berlusconi.

Is this finally the beginning of the end? I won't count those chickens just yet, but it's a start.

And a decent snapshot of a piece on the contradictions of the Italian (European) self-image.

Reflections on the Public Realm, Part 1

2011-06-01T20:57:00.000-04:00

This post is the first in what will be an ongoing series related to conceptual and historical issues of the public realm, the public domain, the public sphere, public space, publicity, and other permutations of publicness. Questions of res publica have been of interest to me since I studied architectural design as an undergrad at Notre Dame. Recently they have become central to my academic work and figure prominently in my dissertation, in progress, on classicism in the architecture of New York City in the late 19th century.

As I see it, architecture has an intimate relationship with the public realm and thus to political questions in the broadest sense. This is hardly a novel or contentious statement, yet it's surprising how little has actually been said among architectural historians about the relationship of architecture to the public realm (excepting, of course, the broad and by now almost banal claims of architecture's role in symbolizing regimes of power, of which there is plenty of writing). Therefore, in these posts I hope to make some sense of this relationship and of related issues of publicity as a way of working through ideas and gaining greater clarity for my dissertation and (hopefully) eventual publications. Comments are especially welcome on these posts, so don't be shy.

Today I want to start simply with a quote from a book I just finished reading: The Public Realm: Exploring the City's Quintessential Social Territory, by Lyn H. Lofland (Aldine Transaction, 1998). She writes in a footnote:

"I think it is no coincidence that contemporary scholars most prone to the antirealism and nihilism of radical postmodernism seem frequently to be those whose primary objects of study have an insubstantial character, e.g., meanings, images, representations. As a 'cure' for their delusions, I would prescribe a period of forced research concentration on either the natural or the built environment, or both."

This is an interesting notion, especially given the fact that "spatial" and "public" issues are often at the center of the radical postmodernism she decries (although she doesn't name names). Yet her insistence that studying physical form can be an antidote to nihilism especially is a breath of fresh air.

The fact of architecture's presence, its present-ness, its being-in-the-world, if I may get a bit phenomenological for a moment, has always seemed in a self-evident sort of way to provide a natural hook to reality. Such is the reason that I find deconstruction and similar sorts of what Lofland calls "radical postmodernism" to be contrary to architecture's insistent physicality and presence. In literary deconstruction it may be possible to theorize away authorial intention, common-sense meaning, etc., but in a physical artifact as obstinate and (relatively) permanent as architecture, especially pre-1945 architecture, the nihilism implicated in radical postmodernism (witnessed by its very often cryptic, unreadable prose) seems untenable.

Palin Meets Trump

2011-05-31T20:40:00.005-04:00

Can you imagine what these two had to say to each other? I'm surprised a hole wasn't ripped in the space-time continuum.

I'd rather converse with Brittany about credit-default swaps and an Afghanistan exit strategy.

Back to Mackintosh...

2011-05-31T17:50:00.002-04:00

Word from the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society that several of the great architects' works are threatened with serious decay, demanding immediate attention. Sadly, some of his best known works are on the list, including the Willow Tea Rooms and Hill House.

Public Art and Gallery Art

2011-05-30T22:23:00.003-04:00

On the topic of public art my personal views are probably more tolerant than my views on architecture. Public art is generally smaller in scale and thus smaller in impact than buildings. And sometimes the bizarre fits perfectly well with its surroundings, or challenges those surroundings in a compelling way. Jean Dubuffet's Four Trees at Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York makes that banal space more interesting than it would be otherwise:

At Big Think there's an article on a recently unveiled sculpture of Pope John Paul II in Rome by artist Oliviero Rainaldi:

The work is intended to be celebratory and honorific but apparently it's detested by many Romans and devout Catholics. Bob Duggan writes, "Artists need to feel they can express their ideas without the public looking over their shoulder in what amounts to real time." This is, I think, the standard view in public art circles, at least among critics and academics. But this view reverses the historical standard by which public work was held to higher standards of public accountability. Unlike gallery art, where an artist has theoretically unlimited creative scope to be self-expressive, public works necessarily enter into a kind of compact whereby conventions and legibility are valid constraints on the artist's self-expressiveness. Dubuffet's Trees conform to the compact because they are largely perceived to improve the space they occupy. Such a work would not be appropriate for, say, Piazza Navona. Whether or not the Rainaldi sculpture is good art is open to debate, but the terms of that debate should, I think, honor the fundamental differences between gallery art and public art.