A Lyrical Poet / A Blinded Critic

UPDATE: It seems that previous articles by Ouroussoff have given me similar thoughts.

Pierre Chareau's Maison de Verre (Glass House) is a great house. Chareau designed it in the early 1930s, a time in Paris when Modernism was mainly in the future and its promise was great. By Modernism, I don't mean stylistic elements like flat roofs and glass block, but the promise of technology and even democracy.

When I first went to France 35 years later, it was still, along with many great things, the land of smelly Turkish toilets and unpotable water. But Chareau's bathroom in his first residential design was lyrical, with magical exposed pipes and tubs on display in the middle of the room like great works of art.

I was moved by Chareau's eloquence when I got to visit the house in 1977 as an architecture student. On the same day we saw the ham-fisted poetry of Richard Rogers at the Pompidou Center, still under construction. Rogers gave us a tour, and described a massive indent in a cavernous floor as "the poet's corner." Only a decade or two later, his giant and clumsy exposed pipes on the outside of the Pompidou had to be replaced at great expense. Putting them out in the rain had been a silly idea.

At the Maison de Verre, plumbing and technology were new, and Chareau's design was responsive and inspired. Forty-five years later, Richard Rogers rehash of the same ideas at the Pompidou Center sometimes descended into the insensitive and clichéd. Modernism was a tired ideology.

The New York Times architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff, doesn't get this. He is single-minded propagandist for Modernism and the Avant Garde. Worst of all, he thinks these are new ideas.

In today's Times, he writes about the Maison de Verre, calling it "the best house in Paris." What nonsense. He's so blinded by ideology that he writes off two millennia of better houses. Why does the Times put up with this architectural Babbittry?

PS: It's interesting that one of America's architectural masterpieces was also called the "Glass House." Following Philip Johnson's death at 98, it's now open to the public, and the Maison de Verre soon will be, following its restoration by its new American owner.

So why are architects today acting like glass is a "new" material? In a recent review of Bob Stern's apartment house at 15 Central Park West in Manhattan, Paul Goldberger (a former architecture critic for the Times), called glass "the new white brick." He was referring to the period in the 1960s when New York architects essentially abandoned stone and red brick in the design of Manhattan apartment houses, using glazed white brick instead.