Up On the Roof

SOMETHING CALLED "THE NEW DISCOURSE" is starting up among traditional architects. In a nutshell, it’s a discussion of the contemporary practice of traditional architecture for practitioners not represented by the academic and conservative arguments usually heard today. Until now, the discussion of contemporary traditional design has been firmly rooted in pre-modern practice and theory (let's call it the Old Discourse), and we need a discussion that lets everyone in.

The New Discourse and its relationship to the Old Discourse is the subject of an article I'm writing for the next issue of Traditional Building. I'll post that when I can, but until then a litmus test came up on the TradArch and New Discourse lists today: the latest environmental fad, green roofs.

The Old Discourse says, "Green roofs are silly. Traditional roofs are better." The New Discourse says, "Do they work? If so, let's use them. Traditional design and experience will make them better."

There is a history of things like sod roofs (Didn't the Hobbits have those?), but the Roof Gardens of a hundred years ago might be more fruitful sources of study. They don't have the technological edge of the new green roofs, but back before air conditioning they made cities bearable in the summer, and we may want them again if the Long Emergency comes.

Just as important, they were a lot more beautiful, because they were made for humans. While many architects treat green roofs as the type of technological form generator earnest Modernism is always looking for (Form Follows Function - Arbeit Macht Frei, in the original German).

One of the first and most beautiful of New York's roof gardens was Madison Square Garden, designed by Stanford White, who was shot there. (White seduced, or vice versa, the young Evelyn Nesbit, in White's studio and den of iniquity in the tower on the roof. Nesbit's later husband killed White in return. "My God, I've shot the wrong architect," he reportedly said after entering a particularly declassé hotel.)

The MSG dystopia on 9th Avenue, next to Penn Station (which replaced another McKim, Mead & White masterpiece – "You used to enter the city like a god, now you creep in like a rat," Vincent Scully said of the old and new buildings,) is named for White's Madison Square Garden, because of the original's roof and its location on the corner of Madison Square.

I've put more pictures of it in the New York photo album, here.