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Wednesday, June 27, 2007
UPDATE: What you want, What you get.
A SURE BET: If you say something like "Modernism produced some great buildings, but it produced very few great places" in a public talk, chances are good that an architect will stand up at the end and challenge that. Here's how to make some money, or at least end the discussion, when that happens.
Offer to pay $10 (or $100) for every ugly traditional building the architect can show you within a five or ten mile radius. In return, he or she will pay you $1 (or $10) for every bad Modernist building you pass along the way. If they're crazy enough to take the bet, you'll clean up.
HOWITZERS PARK in Richmond, Virginia, before and after Virginia Commonwealth University replaced a row of rowhouses with a new auditorium. Photos courtesy of Calder Loth.
I UNDERSTAND why architects thought it was necessary to invent Modernist architecture, but why did we blind ourselves to what we were doing to our cities, towns and neighborhoods?
Modernism produced some great buildings. It produced very few great places, while ruining many.
June 27, 2007 in Architecture, Culture, Current Affairs, History, New Urbanism, Urbanism | Permalink
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God, the picture really says it all. It's been death by a thousand cuts for our landscape. The only thing that will bring it back at this point is new trad-arch, and hopefully we'll start seeing more and more of it.
Posted by: Gizler at Jun 28, 2007 10:13:30 AM
The source of many problems with contemporary architecture is that it is easy to do. Type the desired specifications and dimensions for a building into a computer program, distort the resulting box for selected style and context, prepare the client an artist's rendering with landscaping and upper middle-class pedestrians, and voila! Clearly, this happened in Richmond to a neighborhood which should have been preserved.
What is missing in today's design is taste and talent, for which no program can substitute. Many trained architects have neither, which is why America is filling up with either dreadful pastiches of Colonial houses on the low end, or oppressive Futurama aberrations on the high end. Great design has at its soul a profound geometry and sense of proportion, the multiplicity of a building's parts made unified and coherent by the use of regulating lines in architecture. These design fundamentals are wonderfully explained and illustrated by Le Corbusier in his treatise. And until they are revived, understood and practiced, whether in traditionalist or modernist forms, the kitsch shall inherit the earth.
Posted by: Roland at Jun 30, 2007 10:57:12 AM
Mistah Massengale, cwould it be possible to have copies of the (JPG?) files of the two pictures in this post? I'd like to have as a side-by-side.
Posted by: Luca at Jul 19, 2007 7:34:50 AM
Sheer vandalism.
Posted by: anonymous at Aug 29, 2007 6:11:06 PM
