Artistic "geniuses" have done a lot of harm. They seem to forget that they're public servants. You're not making a monument to your stupid ego; you're making a product for the public.
I agree with this only up to a point. I've been a member of a client's 'user group' for a fairly high-profile building project with a (at least locally) 'famous architect', and it's not that easy. A good architect will 'know better', but how many popular architects today are 'good' in the sense you're assuming? Our project was a multi-year struggle to protect ourselves from the architect's stupid ideas aimed at gratifying his 'vision' for the building, but that would have proved anywhere from inconvenient to disastrous to us as users.
The debates sometimes got quite heated. This architect and I don't exchange Christmas cards . . . .
A local magnate paid for a city arboretum that I walk through in nice weather. They added a fenced playground for little kids next to the building. They used football-sized rocks to edge the astroturf a few feet from the apparatuses. At an event last weekend, I pointed out they were one trip away from a dead or brain-damaged child and a major lawsuit. The woman said, "But the designers approved it, so it must be okay." Guess I'd better email the mayor. How many playgrounds have they made that dangerous?
I agree more with you than with Dorkwad; in New Jersey a lot of schools have been built and renovated in the last 25 years, and each town wants a unique-looking school. Since the state is paying a good portion of the freight, they can insist that the towns choose from among a dozen (or whatever number) designs, but they don't, so the architectural firms (as well as other related professionals) made a killing.
Steve - I think you need to revisit Brainstorm. It somewhat predicted VR, online porn, and host of other dystopian technology we’re just catching up with.
If that photo of a waiting room is supposed to be Penn Station, it isn't the one in NYC. McKim's was modeled on the enormous Tepidarium of the Baths of Caracalla, and it had separate interior waiting rooms for each sex and a glass-roofed concourse.
The same firm, but it was finished in '35 (see the airplane bas relief), and White was murdered in '06, McKim died in '09, and Mead in '28. I became obsessed with NY Old Penn station last year and bought a book about its birth, life, and death. McKim talked the RR board out of including a hotel in the station which might have saved it from destruction.
Edit: it could have been the same guy who did most of the work during McKim's decline.
As you well know, the Hotel Pennsylvania was built across 7th Avenue from Penn Station and was also designed by MM&W; it managed to last until 2023. Until its closing day in April 2020, its phone number was PEnnsylvania 6-5000, which inspired the famous Glenn Miller song.
Communist and open and shamelessly practicing homosexual. 'Nuff said about how bad his art would be.
Separately, a great example of the fall of American architecture can be seen not just at Yale, but in NYC at Columbia. Columbia's quad (where undergraduates go to class and live) was famously designed by McKim, Mead & White, and contains beautiful buildings with neoclassical design and greened-copper roofs. Many major films like to shoot there, including the Tobey Maguire/Sam Raimi Spiderman 1, Will Smith's Hitch, and, perhaps most famously, the original Ghostbusters:
But then you merely have to cross the street to the Law School to see the downfall. Jerome Greene Hall -- the law school building --- is an ugly brutalist mess, designed by Wallace Kirkman Harrison and ((Max Abramovitz)). A concrete monstrosity, its as ugly as Rudolph's buildings. Furthermore, being just across from such beauty as the main campus, the whiplash is astounding---like going from a gourmet meal to a prison cafeteria.
But the topper is this: above one of the entrances to the hall is a sculpture of "Bellerophon Taming Pegasus." The myth of Bellerophon taming the wild flying horse Pegasus is a motif in legal/philosophical art, as it is often used to portray reason (Bellerophon) taming emotion/nature (Pegasus). However, this version, designed by a cubist ((Jacques Lipchitz)), is so ugly and so confusing to look at that you can't even distinguish Bellerophon or Pegasus existing, as it just looks like a mess, and each time someone takes a tour it has to be explained to them what the sculpture actually depicts.
Why do Rudolph /Foucault types ascend so high? Perhaps there is something in their unusual combination of masculine and feminine traits that makes them successful at getting their way in the world of culture.
Wright's Unitarian background was proto-woke, one might say
Homosexuals, not being masculine, avoid direct competition and tend to embrace the very feminine qualities of manipulation, blackmail, and reputation destruction. However, being male, their energy, intelligence, and boldness are far beyond most females. Thus, they become extremely good at climbing social ladders , much better than females, once they set their minds to it, and staying on top once they reach it.
Thus any social structure that is sufficiently established and moneyed is going to have fa66ots infesting it. This is why there is the consistent irony that at the top of female-beloved, female-audience-dominated wealthy social hierarchies such as architecture, art, musicals, fashion, and pop music you'll find a handful of gay men controlling everything.
It’s wrong to compare Rudolph to Howard Roark. Being a fictional character, Roark did not exist, and his attributes are the attributes depicted in the book. His buildings may have been modernist, but (as depicted) were eminently practical. In fact, he designed vacation properties for a Producers-like scam, where the developers wanted the project to fail. It didn’t fail because people loved it so much! Plus, he was too good at structural engineering for his roofs to leak.
Roark did not let his clients dictate the design, but his buildings were built for particular uses. This means an apartment complex was perfectly suited for people to live in, a factory was very efficiently laid out, etc. The perfect means/ends correspondence was part of Rand’s philosophy.
Now maybe a real life Roark would inevitably end up like Rudolph, humans being what they are. But that’s a problem with Rand, not Roark.
I feel obliged to share an exception to the Ugly Art Department building: the Frick Fine Arts Building at Pitt, where I once took a class as an undergrad. I'm assuming the funding and oversight from Henry Clay Frick's daughter is what kept it classy despite being built in the early 1960s: https://www.tour.pitt.edu/tour/frick-fine-arts-building
No need to blame Ayn Rand for what is Marxist architecture. After WWII Marxists dominated the architectural field and set out to destroy beautiful old buildings to erase the memory of the past. This happened all over Europe, and no doubt it was the same in the U.S. The brutalist style was their work. Their planners also loved the thought of placing large highways through towns in such a way that historical areas would be ruined.
They said an apartment building should not have a pointed roof because that was just a symbol of the bourgeoisie dreaming of wearing a crown like the king. So rooftops should be flat, which makes no sense in countries with heavy snowfall. They mocked those architects who thought of adding color to buildings - one architect had to defend his added color by pointing out that it was red, like Marxism.
Communism had always included the dream of the gigantic apartment complex, which would function like a machine, where people lived, worked, married, went to party meetings, and died, without ever having to leave the building. There'd be no money, no job seeking, only planning. They never got there, but they did build large drab, block-shaped apartment buildings, and also public buildings in cubic style and other ways to mock "the forces of Tradition and Reaction."
In the Soviet Union they built enormous apartment buildings, often attached to the factories, on the way to that dream about living life in the machine. (That is why tons of people were made homeless in the 1990s. Boris Yeltsin had four economic advisers from Harvard, and with their urging and because he took bribes, he allowed the 12 "oligarchs" to buy Soviet industries for peanuts. (Eight of the twelve were Jews, like at least two of the Harvard advisers, but that is surely a coincidence.) They cut up and sold the factories for parts, and all the old people living in the attached apartment buildings were thrown out of their homes. When Putin came to power he helped them, and prosecuted the oligarchs for their tax evasions, forcing them to flee to London and Tel Aviv. Freed from oligarch control the economy quickly improved, and crime fell. In case you wonder why Putin quickly became so loved, and why the oligarchs' supporters in the Western media hated him.)
Alas, the dream of life in the machine never came to fruition. Communism never won the Battle of Production, it never reached the Land of Plenty. So communists in the West did an 180 degree turn, declaring technology evil instead, mentioning it only in the context of pollution that would cause the "greenhouse effect." (Which would cause global cooling, with the smoke clouds blocking the sun. Though that was changed in the 1980s to global warming, because the smoke clouds would prevent the heat from leaving Earth.) Because technology was the invention of the West, so this was another way of making Westerners feel ashamed of themselves, feeling that they needed state control and mass immigration of people who lived "in harmony with nature" (i.e. never invented the wheel and left their old in the jungle to die).
If we had honest school teachers and media they would show children the fact that communism went from creating the most hideous buildings in the world and praising the East European and Asian-communist states that created the world's worst pollution, to praising "living in harmony with nature" and accusing "capitalism" of the crimes of creating pollution and buildings above the level of wooden huts.
Aliens/future historians/anybody with their eyes open will notice the shocking rupture in western architecture in the 20th century. It's especially heartbreaking when you look at buildings devoted to 'higher' purposes such as churches, universities, and so on. When people (in this case specifically architects) stopped believing in the transcendent, or at least taking it seriously, their centuries-running, varied-but-coherent vision of beauty dissolved and decayed into narcissistic self-gratification.
And this has certainly not been just an American problem. For example, if you go to one of the western world's most gorgeous built landscapes, i.e. the center of Oxford, with its colleges, University Church, etc., and you start visiting the colleges themselves, you'll soon realize that the majority of them have at least one or two modernist/brutalist/postmodernist monstrosities lurking behind -- and sometimes even looming above -- their ancient and magnificent core quads. Many of the university faculty and administration buildings put up in recent decades are equally horrific. Once you start seeing these vomitous excrescences, it's hard to stop; they're all over the place, mocking the marvelous unity and beauty of the older city.
Bill Bryson, the well-known US-turned-UK travel writer, spends a considerable proportion of his tour-around-the-UK book *Notes from a Small Island* bemoaning the way urban planners and others tasked with putting up new buildings in the UK from the 1960s onward have shat upon the the country's vast and generally lovely built history. Bryson is a first-rate comic travel writer, but he's a dunce when it comes to anything deeper. He is incapable of seeing any connections between the kind of purely secular, socialist-to-hard-left government he loves, loves, loves, and the architectural insults to the western tradition he's gotten rich whining about.
For those unfamiliar with New York geography, Orange County is not some backwater; it is literally two counties up the river from NYC, albeit on the west side of the Hudson. It has a population of over 401,000 (the 7th highest in NY outside of NYC) and is home to West Point. One can easily take a train from Tuxedo to Hoboken in 55 minutes.
In 1926, the renowned American social critic H.L. Menchen wrote a famously acerbic essay The Libido for the Ugly in which he wonders if there “is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake”. Deconstructivism is an architectural style that dates from the 1980s but has ideological roots that go back much further. The basic idea is this: let’s take something that you ordinary people ‘out there’ used to think of as ordered, graceful and beautiful and then let’s ‘deconstruct’ it. Trash it in other words. Shock you; ‘challenge’ you; disorientate you. “If you don’t get why we are doing this” they say “it must be because you are unsophisticated. It must be because you don’t get… The Future”. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/deconstructing-deconstructivism
Roark always designed for use and practicality! The idea was custom made for the people who inhabited it and not for outside tastes. Although he was fictional to be fair…
At the “Institute of Mentalphysics” in Joshua Tree there is good modern architecture which ensures privacy and engages with the environment. It is next to a cult, however.
Artistic "geniuses" have done a lot of harm. They seem to forget that they're public servants. You're not making a monument to your stupid ego; you're making a product for the public.
Usually, you can blame the client who wants something memorable and doesn't look at practicality. A good architect should know better.
I agree with this only up to a point. I've been a member of a client's 'user group' for a fairly high-profile building project with a (at least locally) 'famous architect', and it's not that easy. A good architect will 'know better', but how many popular architects today are 'good' in the sense you're assuming? Our project was a multi-year struggle to protect ourselves from the architect's stupid ideas aimed at gratifying his 'vision' for the building, but that would have proved anywhere from inconvenient to disastrous to us as users.
The debates sometimes got quite heated. This architect and I don't exchange Christmas cards . . . .
A local magnate paid for a city arboretum that I walk through in nice weather. They added a fenced playground for little kids next to the building. They used football-sized rocks to edge the astroturf a few feet from the apparatuses. At an event last weekend, I pointed out they were one trip away from a dead or brain-damaged child and a major lawsuit. The woman said, "But the designers approved it, so it must be okay." Guess I'd better email the mayor. How many playgrounds have they made that dangerous?
I agree more with you than with Dorkwad; in New Jersey a lot of schools have been built and renovated in the last 25 years, and each town wants a unique-looking school. Since the state is paying a good portion of the freight, they can insist that the towns choose from among a dozen (or whatever number) designs, but they don't, so the architectural firms (as well as other related professionals) made a killing.
Steve - I think you need to revisit Brainstorm. It somewhat predicted VR, online porn, and host of other dystopian technology we’re just catching up with.
If that photo of a waiting room is supposed to be Penn Station, it isn't the one in NYC. McKim's was modeled on the enormous Tepidarium of the Baths of Caracalla, and it had separate interior waiting rooms for each sex and a glass-roofed concourse.
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eMZf9Xgo6hQ/YaleJ36bktI/AAAAAAAAhNQ/aQUy82lsA84LcpzWXnWuipo6DCBR4mAKQCNcBGAsYHQ/s2048/old-penn-station-pictures-new-york%2B%25283%2529.jpg
"What I’ve always from the men’s room" Hopefully, not what Rudolph was probably looking for.
Good call, the depiction in the article is of Newark Penn Station, located 10 miles (and two stops) away. The two stations had the same architects.
The same firm, but it was finished in '35 (see the airplane bas relief), and White was murdered in '06, McKim died in '09, and Mead in '28. I became obsessed with NY Old Penn station last year and bought a book about its birth, life, and death. McKim talked the RR board out of including a hotel in the station which might have saved it from destruction.
Edit: it could have been the same guy who did most of the work during McKim's decline.
As you well know, the Hotel Pennsylvania was built across 7th Avenue from Penn Station and was also designed by MM&W; it managed to last until 2023. Until its closing day in April 2020, its phone number was PEnnsylvania 6-5000, which inspired the famous Glenn Miller song.
Thanks, I'll fix it and put in the usual photo of old Penn Station.
Communist and open and shamelessly practicing homosexual. 'Nuff said about how bad his art would be.
Separately, a great example of the fall of American architecture can be seen not just at Yale, but in NYC at Columbia. Columbia's quad (where undergraduates go to class and live) was famously designed by McKim, Mead & White, and contains beautiful buildings with neoclassical design and greened-copper roofs. Many major films like to shoot there, including the Tobey Maguire/Sam Raimi Spiderman 1, Will Smith's Hitch, and, perhaps most famously, the original Ghostbusters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjzC1Dgh17A
But then you merely have to cross the street to the Law School to see the downfall. Jerome Greene Hall -- the law school building --- is an ugly brutalist mess, designed by Wallace Kirkman Harrison and ((Max Abramovitz)). A concrete monstrosity, its as ugly as Rudolph's buildings. Furthermore, being just across from such beauty as the main campus, the whiplash is astounding---like going from a gourmet meal to a prison cafeteria.
But the topper is this: above one of the entrances to the hall is a sculpture of "Bellerophon Taming Pegasus." The myth of Bellerophon taming the wild flying horse Pegasus is a motif in legal/philosophical art, as it is often used to portray reason (Bellerophon) taming emotion/nature (Pegasus). However, this version, designed by a cubist ((Jacques Lipchitz)), is so ugly and so confusing to look at that you can't even distinguish Bellerophon or Pegasus existing, as it just looks like a mess, and each time someone takes a tour it has to be explained to them what the sculpture actually depicts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellerophon_Taming_Pegasus
What ugliness, what failure as art and intellectualism. What a fall we have made!
Comparing his brutalist garbage with The gorgeous Penn Station? Now that’s a leap!
Samuel Hughes has a great argument on the need for "easy" i.e. humble architecture
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/making-architecture-easy/
Why do Rudolph /Foucault types ascend so high? Perhaps there is something in their unusual combination of masculine and feminine traits that makes them successful at getting their way in the world of culture.
Wright's Unitarian background was proto-woke, one might say
https://flwright.org/explore/unity-temple
Homosexuals, not being masculine, avoid direct competition and tend to embrace the very feminine qualities of manipulation, blackmail, and reputation destruction. However, being male, their energy, intelligence, and boldness are far beyond most females. Thus, they become extremely good at climbing social ladders , much better than females, once they set their minds to it, and staying on top once they reach it.
Thus any social structure that is sufficiently established and moneyed is going to have fa66ots infesting it. This is why there is the consistent irony that at the top of female-beloved, female-audience-dominated wealthy social hierarchies such as architecture, art, musicals, fashion, and pop music you'll find a handful of gay men controlling everything.
excellent, thank you
It’s wrong to compare Rudolph to Howard Roark. Being a fictional character, Roark did not exist, and his attributes are the attributes depicted in the book. His buildings may have been modernist, but (as depicted) were eminently practical. In fact, he designed vacation properties for a Producers-like scam, where the developers wanted the project to fail. It didn’t fail because people loved it so much! Plus, he was too good at structural engineering for his roofs to leak.
Roark did not let his clients dictate the design, but his buildings were built for particular uses. This means an apartment complex was perfectly suited for people to live in, a factory was very efficiently laid out, etc. The perfect means/ends correspondence was part of Rand’s philosophy.
Now maybe a real life Roark would inevitably end up like Rudolph, humans being what they are. But that’s a problem with Rand, not Roark.
I feel obliged to share an exception to the Ugly Art Department building: the Frick Fine Arts Building at Pitt, where I once took a class as an undergrad. I'm assuming the funding and oversight from Henry Clay Frick's daughter is what kept it classy despite being built in the early 1960s: https://www.tour.pitt.edu/tour/frick-fine-arts-building
No need to blame Ayn Rand for what is Marxist architecture. After WWII Marxists dominated the architectural field and set out to destroy beautiful old buildings to erase the memory of the past. This happened all over Europe, and no doubt it was the same in the U.S. The brutalist style was their work. Their planners also loved the thought of placing large highways through towns in such a way that historical areas would be ruined.
They said an apartment building should not have a pointed roof because that was just a symbol of the bourgeoisie dreaming of wearing a crown like the king. So rooftops should be flat, which makes no sense in countries with heavy snowfall. They mocked those architects who thought of adding color to buildings - one architect had to defend his added color by pointing out that it was red, like Marxism.
Communism had always included the dream of the gigantic apartment complex, which would function like a machine, where people lived, worked, married, went to party meetings, and died, without ever having to leave the building. There'd be no money, no job seeking, only planning. They never got there, but they did build large drab, block-shaped apartment buildings, and also public buildings in cubic style and other ways to mock "the forces of Tradition and Reaction."
In the Soviet Union they built enormous apartment buildings, often attached to the factories, on the way to that dream about living life in the machine. (That is why tons of people were made homeless in the 1990s. Boris Yeltsin had four economic advisers from Harvard, and with their urging and because he took bribes, he allowed the 12 "oligarchs" to buy Soviet industries for peanuts. (Eight of the twelve were Jews, like at least two of the Harvard advisers, but that is surely a coincidence.) They cut up and sold the factories for parts, and all the old people living in the attached apartment buildings were thrown out of their homes. When Putin came to power he helped them, and prosecuted the oligarchs for their tax evasions, forcing them to flee to London and Tel Aviv. Freed from oligarch control the economy quickly improved, and crime fell. In case you wonder why Putin quickly became so loved, and why the oligarchs' supporters in the Western media hated him.)
Alas, the dream of life in the machine never came to fruition. Communism never won the Battle of Production, it never reached the Land of Plenty. So communists in the West did an 180 degree turn, declaring technology evil instead, mentioning it only in the context of pollution that would cause the "greenhouse effect." (Which would cause global cooling, with the smoke clouds blocking the sun. Though that was changed in the 1980s to global warming, because the smoke clouds would prevent the heat from leaving Earth.) Because technology was the invention of the West, so this was another way of making Westerners feel ashamed of themselves, feeling that they needed state control and mass immigration of people who lived "in harmony with nature" (i.e. never invented the wheel and left their old in the jungle to die).
If we had honest school teachers and media they would show children the fact that communism went from creating the most hideous buildings in the world and praising the East European and Asian-communist states that created the world's worst pollution, to praising "living in harmony with nature" and accusing "capitalism" of the crimes of creating pollution and buildings above the level of wooden huts.
somewhat ot but have been re-reading bauhaus to ours by t. wolfe. this sort of thing has been going fooor suuuch a looong time.
Aliens/future historians/anybody with their eyes open will notice the shocking rupture in western architecture in the 20th century. It's especially heartbreaking when you look at buildings devoted to 'higher' purposes such as churches, universities, and so on. When people (in this case specifically architects) stopped believing in the transcendent, or at least taking it seriously, their centuries-running, varied-but-coherent vision of beauty dissolved and decayed into narcissistic self-gratification.
And this has certainly not been just an American problem. For example, if you go to one of the western world's most gorgeous built landscapes, i.e. the center of Oxford, with its colleges, University Church, etc., and you start visiting the colleges themselves, you'll soon realize that the majority of them have at least one or two modernist/brutalist/postmodernist monstrosities lurking behind -- and sometimes even looming above -- their ancient and magnificent core quads. Many of the university faculty and administration buildings put up in recent decades are equally horrific. Once you start seeing these vomitous excrescences, it's hard to stop; they're all over the place, mocking the marvelous unity and beauty of the older city.
Bill Bryson, the well-known US-turned-UK travel writer, spends a considerable proportion of his tour-around-the-UK book *Notes from a Small Island* bemoaning the way urban planners and others tasked with putting up new buildings in the UK from the 1960s onward have shat upon the the country's vast and generally lovely built history. Bryson is a first-rate comic travel writer, but he's a dunce when it comes to anything deeper. He is incapable of seeing any connections between the kind of purely secular, socialist-to-hard-left government he loves, loves, loves, and the architectural insults to the western tradition he's gotten rich whining about.
Architects: good servants, poor masters. Expensive either way.
Too bad those brutalist slab constructs are so nearly fireproof.
For those unfamiliar with New York geography, Orange County is not some backwater; it is literally two counties up the river from NYC, albeit on the west side of the Hudson. It has a population of over 401,000 (the 7th highest in NY outside of NYC) and is home to West Point. One can easily take a train from Tuxedo to Hoboken in 55 minutes.
In 1926, the renowned American social critic H.L. Menchen wrote a famously acerbic essay The Libido for the Ugly in which he wonders if there “is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake”. Deconstructivism is an architectural style that dates from the 1980s but has ideological roots that go back much further. The basic idea is this: let’s take something that you ordinary people ‘out there’ used to think of as ordered, graceful and beautiful and then let’s ‘deconstruct’ it. Trash it in other words. Shock you; ‘challenge’ you; disorientate you. “If you don’t get why we are doing this” they say “it must be because you are unsophisticated. It must be because you don’t get… The Future”. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/deconstructing-deconstructivism
Roark always designed for use and practicality! The idea was custom made for the people who inhabited it and not for outside tastes. Although he was fictional to be fair…
At the “Institute of Mentalphysics” in Joshua Tree there is good modern architecture which ensures privacy and engages with the environment. It is next to a cult, however.
Faddish products of leftist political ferment leave lasting legacy of civic ugliness, great white men to blame