why architecture matters

why architecture matters

paul goldberger

yale university press

new haven and london
Copyright © 2009 by Paul Goldberger. All rights reserved. This book may
not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without
written permission from the publishers.

Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund. Designed by
Nancy Ovedovitz and set in Adobe Garamond type by Keystone Typesetting,
Inc., Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania. Printed in the United States of America.
Photo editor: Natalie Matutschovsky

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goldberger, Paul.
Why architecture matters / Paul Goldberger.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-14430-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Architecture—Psychological aspects. 2. Architecture and
society. I. Title.
NA2540.G63 2009

720.1’03—dc22 2009011071

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO

Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
also by paul goldberger
The City Observed, New York: An Architectural Guide to Manhattan
The Skyscraper
On the Rise: Architecture and Design in a Post-modern Age
Houses of the Hamptons
Manhattan Unfurled (with Matteo Pericoli)
The World Trade Center Remembered
Up from Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York
Beyond the Dunes (with Jake Rajs)
For Susan, Adam, Ben, and Alex;
Delphine, Thibeaux, and Josephine

and for Vincent Scully

contents
Introduction

one Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

two Challenge and Comfort

three Architecture as Object

four Architecture as Space

five Architecture and Memory

six Buildings and Time

seven Buildings and the Making of Place

Glossary

A Note on Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits

Index
introduction
We could not live without architecture, but that is not why it matters. The
purpose of this book is to explain what buildings do beyond keeping us out of
the rain. Architecture may be able to stake a claim to being necessary to our
lives in a way that poetry and literature and painting cannot, but the fact that
buildings give us shelter is not the answer to the question posed by the title.
If it were as simple as that, there would be nothing left to say.
Architecture begins to matter when it goes beyond protecting us from the
elements, when it begins to say something about the world—when it begins
to take on the qualities of art. You could say that architecture is what happens
when people build with an awareness that they are doing something that
reaches at least a little bit beyond the practical. It may be as tiny a gesture as
painting the front door of a house red or as grand an undertaking as creating
the rose window of a cathedral. It can be as casual as a sliver of decorative
molding around a window or as carefully wrought as the ceiling of a
Baroque church. A clapboard farmhouse with a columned porch is
architecture; so is a house by Frank Lloyd Wright in which every inch of
every wall, every window, and every door is part of an elaborately
considered composition. Wright liked to say that architecture began when he
started building his sprawling modern houses on the American prairie; Mies
van der Rohe said, more poetically and also more modestly, that the origin of
architecture was in the first time “two bricks were put together well.”
The making of architecture is intimately connected to the knowledge that
buildings instill within us emotional reactions. They can make us feel and
they can also make us think. Architecture begins to matter when it brings
delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads.
It matters when it creates serenity or exhilaration, and it matters just as much,
I have to say, when it inspires anxiety, hostility, or fear. Buildings can do all
of these things, and more. They represent social ideals; they are political
statements; they are cultural icons. Architecture is surely our greatest
physical symbol of the idea of community, our surest way to express in
concrete form our belief in the notion of common ground. The way a
community builds tells you, sometimes, all you need to know about its
values: just to look at Radburn, New Jersey, will tell you that it is a suburb
built to control the automobile, in the same way that it does not take long to
figure out that Positano and the rest of the Amalfi Coast in Italy were built to
connect to the sea. You can understand the difference between, say, the leafy
precincts of Greenwich, Connecticut, and the suburban tracts of Levittown,
Long Island, more easily, I suspect, by comparing Greenwich’s estates to
Levittown’s houses than you could by looking at the residents of each
community. The people can mislead you more easily than their architecture
can.
Buildings also stand as evidence of the power of memory. Who has not
returned after many years to a house, a school, a hotel, or some other place in
which meaningful events in your life occurred and not found that the
buildings themselves unleashed a sense of the past too strong to ignore?
Architectural historian Vincent Scully has said that architecture is a
conversation between the generations, carried out across time, and while you
could say that this is true of all forms of art and culture, in architecture the
conversation is the most conspicuous, the most obvious, the most impossible
to tune out. We may not all participate in the conversation, but we all have to
listen to it. For that reason alone, architecture matters: because it is all
around us, and what is all around us has to have an effect on us. That effect
may be subtle and barely noticeable, or it may shake us to the core, but it will
never fail to be there.
Because architecture is there, presenting itself to us even when we do not
seek it out or even choose to be conscious of it, it makes sense to think about
it in slightly different terms from the way in which we might discuss, say,
Baroque music or Renaissance sculpture, which is to say that it makes sense
to consider it not only in terms of great masterpieces but also in terms of
everyday experience. Architecture is a part of daily life for everyone,
whether or not they want it to be. You may visit Chartres Cathedral as a
conscious act of intention, just as you might elect to read Madame Bovary or
decide to hear a performance of Beethoven’s late quartets, but you live your
life within and around and beside dozens of other buildings, almost none of
which you have chosen to be with. Some of them may be masterpieces and
some of them may be the architectural equivalent of dime-store novels or
elevator music. It is perfectly reasonable to talk about the meaning of
literature without talking about Danielle Steel, but can you grapple with the
impact of architecture without looking at Main Street?
 I tend to think not, which is why the pages that follow will deal to a great
extent with the everyday experience of looking at buildings, which is, for
most people, a major reason—sometimes the only reason—that architecture
matters. Masterpieces are no less important for this, and they will get plenty
of attention here. It is not wrong to say that the greatest buildings provide the
greatest moments of architectural experience. They certainly have for me. But
I prefer to see architecture not as a sequential story of masterworks, a saga
beginning with the Pyramids and the Parthenon and extending through
Chartres and the Taj Mahal and the Duomo and the Laurentian Library and St.
Paul’s Cathedral, and then on to the work of Louis Sullivan and Wright and
Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, but as a continuum of cultural
expression. Architecture “is the will of an epoch translated into space,” Mies
said. Buildings tell us what we are and what we want to be, and sometimes it
is the average ones that tell us the most.

There are surely some readers for whom architecture matters in a more
specific way than I have in mind here. For some, architecture matters
because buildings are our greatest consumers of energy (far more than cars),
and if we do not reduce the amount of energy consumed in constructing and
maintaining our buildings, we will be in far worse shape than if every MINI
Cooper owner traded in his car for a Hummer. I could not agree more with
the urgency of the green architecture movement and with the wisdom as well
as the practicality of making sustainable buildings. One of the most
encouraging developments in the past decade is the extent to which the
architectural profession has taken up the values of the environmental
movement and made many of them its own. So I am in complete agreement
with the move toward sustainable architecture, and I do not discuss it in this
book only because my intention is to look at architecture from a broader and
less technical standpoint. But there can be no doubt that one of the ways
architecture continues to matter is in how it uses energy and that reducing the
amount of energy consumed by buildings needs to be one of the highest
priorities of our time.
By the same token, I am sure there are readers who feel that architecture
matters because the building industry occupies a huge position in our
economy and that if we can make it more efficient, the entire economy will
benefit. For others, architecture matters because the technology of building is
undergoing remarkable advances, allowing us to build all kinds of things that
architects once could barely dream about. And there are surely readers who
believe that architecture matters because people are in desperate need of
housing and that architecture has the potential to address this as well as so
many other urgent social needs. Here again, I am in agreement, and I do
discuss the issue of the social responsibility of architecture in a limited way
toward the end of chapter 1. But as with green architecture, the economics
and technical aspects of building are not the focus of this book, however
much I share a belief in their importance.

This book does not argue for a single theory of architecture, an all-
encompassing worldview that can dictate form to the architect and explain it
to the rest of us. I do not believe there is such a thing as a universal recipe
for good architecture; even in ages with much more stylistic coherence than
our own, there have always been a myriad of ways in which different
architects have chosen to build. I am excited by the best architecture of any
style and any period, and although the focus of this book is almost
exclusively on Western architecture, what I say about space and symbol and
form—and about the relation of everyday buildings to special ones—has
application to architecture of all cultures. Architecture takes very different
forms in different cultures, but the nature of our experience with such
fundamental matters as proportion and scale and space and texture and
materials and shapes and light is not as different as the appearance of the
architecture itself may be. And it is the quest to understand these basic things
that interests me the most—far more, surely, than any theory or dogma or
cultural tradition that argues that there is a single acceptable way to build.
Architects, being artists, often see things differently, and they should: it
probably helps to produce an important body of work if you believe that
there is one true way. The blinders that theory represents can be useful,
maybe even essential, to artists in the making of art. But I do not believe that
they help the rest of us to appreciate and understand it.
But if not theory, what? What determines whether, to use Mies’s phrase,
the bricks are put together well? Why do some buildings lift the spirit and
others depress it? Why are some buildings a joy and others painful? And why
do some hardly register at all?
If there are many routes to the kingdom of architectural heaven, it does not
mean that there are not still guideposts along the way. Something has to help
us tell the good from the bad. Some of those guideposts are purely aesthetic:
much proportion, for example, is based on the purity of the so-called Golden
Section, the roughly three-by-five rectangle whose ratio of height to width is
particularly pleasing to the eye, neither too bluntly square nor too elongated.
We can analyze this and other combinations that make buildings pleasing as
objects until we are blue in the face (and I will say something about such
issues of visual perception in chapter 3), but such analyses will take us only
so far. Ultimately architecture, though it can reach great aesthetic heights,
achieves its meaning from the balance between aesthetic and other concerns.
It must be understood as a complex and often contradictory set of conditions,
in which art seeks to find some detente with the realities of the world.
Architecture is always a response to limits—physical constraints, financial
ones, or the demands of function. If it is seen purely as art or purely as a
practical pursuit, it will never really be grasped.

In Art [Objects], Jeanette Winterson asks how we can know the difference
between art to be admired and art to be ignored. “Years ago, when I was
living very briefly with a stockbroker who had a good cellar,” she says, “I
asked him how I could learn about wine.
“ ‘Drink it,’ he said.”
And so it is. Experience is not sufficient, but it is necessary. The only way
to learn is to look, to look again, and then to look some more. If that does not
guarantee connoisseurship in art any more than sampling a lot of wine can
turn someone into a wine expert, it is the only possible beginning, and
ultimately the most urgent part of the long process of learning. This book is
firmly on the side of experience. Between walking the streets and reading a
work of architectural history, I will always choose walking and the power of
real perception. Facts—whether stylistic characteristics, names of obscure
pieces of classical ornament, or the birth-dates of great architects—can
always be found later in books. The sense of being in architectural space—
what it feels like, how it hits you in the eye and swirls around in your gut,
and, if you are very lucky, sends shivers up your spine—cannot be
understood except by being there.
Everything has a feel to it. Not just masterpieces but everything in the built
world. The purpose of this book is to come to grips with how things feel to
us when we stand before them, with how architecture affects us emotionally
as well as intellectually. This book is not a work of architectural history or a
guide to the styles or an architectural dictionary, though it contains elements
of all three of these. Its most important message, I hope, is to encourage you
to look, and to learn gradually how to trust your eye. Look for essences, not
for superficial stylistic detail. Think about intentions, but do not be too
forgiving on their behalf, for they have given birth to more bad architecture
than good. As in art, intentions are necessary, but they are only a beginning,
not an end in themselves. How good intentions become serious ideas which,
in turn, inspire the creation of built form that is capable of pleasing us or,
better still, of moving us, is the subject of the rest of this book.
1
meaning, culture, and symbol
There is no doubt whatever about the influence of architecture
and structure upon human character and action. We make our
buildings and afterwards they make us. They regulate the
course of our lives.
WINSTON CHURCHILL

I know that architecture matters very much to me, but I have no desire to
claim that it can save the world. Great architecture is not bread on the table,
and it is not justice in the courtroom. It affects the quality of life, yes, and
often with an astonishing degree of power. But it does not heal the sick, teach
the ignorant, or in and of itself sustain life. At its best, it can help to heal and
to teach by creating a comfortable and uplifting environment for these things
to take place in. This is but one of the ways in which architecture, though it
may not sustain life, can give the already sustained life meaning. When we
talk about how architecture matters, it is important to understand that the way
in which it matters—beyond, of course, the obvious fact of shelter—is the
same way in which any kind of art matters: it makes life better.
Paradoxically, it is often the most mundane architecture that means the
most to us—the roof over our heads, the random buildings that protect us
from the rain and give us places to work and shop and sleep and be
entertained. Buildings like these—the vernacular, the standard architectural
language—are not the focus of this book, but I will discuss them because I
reject the view that a clear line can be drawn between serious architecture
and ordinary buildings. “A bicycle shed is a building, Lincoln Cathedral is
architecture,” wrote the art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, but what of it?
Both are buildings, both are architecture. Lincoln Cathedral is a vastly more
complex and profound work of architecture than the bicycle shed, and it was
created with more noble aspirations. But each structure has something to say
about the culture that built it, each structure is of at least some interest
visually, and each structure evokes certain feelings and emotions. There is
much more to say about a great cathedral than about a generic shed, but each
helps shape our environment. And the companions of the bicycle shed, the
vernacular commercial and residential architecture of the mall and the
highway strip and the suburban town of today, have a much greater impact on
where we live than a distant cathedral.
Such buildings are not masterpieces, and woe to the politically correct
critic who says they are. Yet we ignore them at our peril. McDonald’s
restaurants? Las Vegas casinos? Mobile homes and suburban tract houses and
strip malls and shopping centers and office parks? They can be banal or they
can be joyful and witty, but they are rarely transcendent. Yet they tell us much
about who we are and about the places we want to make. And often they
work well, galling as this is for most architecture critics to admit. Much of
the built world in the United States is ugly, but then again, most of nineteenth-
century London seemed ugly to Londoners, too. The artlessness of most of
our built environment today probably reveals as much about us as the design
of Paris or Rome revealed about the cultures that built those cities. What is
certain is that it is impossible to think seriously about architecture today and
not think about the built environment as a whole. It is all connected and
interdependent, from freeways to gardens, from shopping malls to churches
and skyscrapers and gas stations. I have no desire to romanticize the
landscape that surrounds us at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but I
know that Pevsner’s academic distinction no longer holds up.
Perhaps it never did, though there was surely a time when ordinary,
everyday architecture seemed in many ways a simplified, scaled-down
edition of great architecture, and the qualitative difference between the two
was barely noticeable. Yes, the Georgian row house in London was more
modest than the great country estate, but the two were of a kind; they spoke
the same language, and even the simple slum houses seemed like stripped-
down versions of the great house, bargain-basement offerings from the same
catalogue. It is striking that it was such a relatively coherent architectural
culture as that of London and other Western European cities that moved
Pevsner to make his arbitrary and cold-hearted distinction between
Architecture with a capital “A” and mere buildings, since the mere buildings
of his experience in the early decades of the past century were far more
ambitious as works of architecture than the mere buildings we see today. In
eighteenth-century London, Georgian architecture created a language, and out
of that language of architectural elements both ordinary buildings and
masterpieces could be made. If you were an architect you understood the
language well and could write in it; if you were an educated layman, you
could recognize and appreciate its details. But if you lacked any knowledge
at all, you could still take pleasure in the clarity and the rhythm of the
buildings constructed in that language, and you could see the way it created a
city of lively beauty.
We need not speak only of London or of Europe. In nineteenth- and early-
twentieth-century New York, for example, there was a quality to the
brownstones that lined the side streets, and to the Georgian- and
Renaissance-inspired apartment buildings that later lined the avenues, and
even to the cramped and fetid tenements, that also suggested a common
architectural language. It was a language of masonry, redolent with ornament
and detail, emerging from the belief that every building, no matter how
private, showed a public presence—that it had an obligation to the street and
to anyone who passed before it, whether or not they had reason to walk
through its doors. A language of scale was shared by the buildings that
together formed the streets of New York in the hundred years from the mid-
nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth; though the buildings were often large,
they were oriented to the pedestrian and connected to one another as
elements along a street—elements of a larger whole, not primarily objects in
themselves. This common language reflected a respect for background, for
the notion that buildings create an urban fabric, and from that comes the
beginning of a civilized environment.
It is odd to think of the decorated cornice on a Ninth Avenue tenement as a
gesture of civilization, but in the cityscape of New York at the end of the
nineteenth century, it surely was. That cornice engages the eye, connects the
building to its neighbors visually, and makes it part of the larger composition
of the street. And it suggests that a building has some purpose other than
merely keeping its occupants out of the rain—to say that it exists, in however
a meager, awkward, even vulgar way, to enrich the city around it. It makes
gestures to you and to me, even if we never have any connection to it other
than walking by.
That intention, the way in which the tenement was clearly intended to
enrich the street and therefore the life of the city, is what makes Pevsner’s
distinction less than useful today. Is the decorated tenement simply a fancy
bicycle shed? Or is it an earthbound echo of Lincoln Cathedral? An
improved ape or a damaged angel? The tenement is a practical construction
designed to be more than merely practical, and—leaving value judgments
aside—that is as good a definition of architecture as I can imagine.
 By that standard, of course, virtually every building is architecture, so
long as its physical form reflects some degree of civilizing intent. The intent
may reveal itself in something as modest as the crude curlicues of the
tenement cornice or as intricate and profound as the stonework and stained
glass of Chartres or the space of Borromini’s extraordinary church of
Sant’Ivo in Rome. Architectural intent is not merely a matter of decoration,
though it can be; it can emerge from the conscious crafting of space, the
deliberate shaping of form, or the juxtaposition of well-considered materials.
Art is defined largely by intention, and so is architecture.
Architecture is balanced, precisely and precariously, between art and
practicality. These needs do not precede art and they do not follow it; they
are not subservient to it and they are not superior to it. Each aspect of
architecture coexists, and every work of architecture must to a greater or
lesser degree take them all into account. Vitruvius, writing in ancient Rome
around 30 bc, set out the three elements of architecture as “commodity,
firmness, and delight,” and no one has done better than his tripartite
definition, for it cogently sums up the architectural paradox: a building must
be useful while at the same time it must be the opposite of useful, since art—
delight, in Vitruvian parlance—by its very essence has no mundane function.
And then, on top of all of that, a building must be constructed according to the
laws of engineering, which is to say that it must be built to stand up.
Vitruvius presents these conflicting realities of architecture not as a
paradox but as a matter of coexistence; his point is to remind us that a
building must simultaneously be useful, well built and visually appealing.
Neither does Vitruvius explicitly rank the three elements in order of
importance. While it can be pleasing to think of them in ascending
significance, this is a subtle footnote to the real message that Vitruvius
conveys, which is that they are interdependent. Without firmness and delight,
commodity is nothing. But delight needs firmness, not only so the building
stands up, but also so its art can reach its greatest heights. The builders of the
Pyramids, the Greek temples, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals were
all engineers as much as architects; to them these disciplines were one. So,
too, with Brunelleschi and his Duomo in Florence, or Michelangelo at St.
Peter’s. In our time, the disciplines have diverged, and engineers are not
architects. But every great structure of modern times, from Jorn Utzon’s
Sydney Opera House to Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, is a
product of engineers as much as of architects; without firmness, there will be
no delight. All three elements of architecture are essential.
So architecture is art and it is not art; it is art and it is something more, or
less, as the case may be. This is its paradox and its glory, and always has
been: art and not art, at once. Architecture is not like a painting or a novel or
a poem; its role is to provide shelter, and its reality in the physical world
makes it unlike anything else that we commonly place in the realm of art.
Unlike a symphony, a building must fulfill a certain practical function—
giving us a place to work, or to live, or to shop or to worship or to be
entertained—and it must stand up. But a building is not at all like other things
that we place in the realm of the practical but that may have aesthetic
aspirations, such as an airplane, an automobile, or a cooking pot. For we
expect a work of architecture, when it succeeds in its aesthetic aims, to be
capable of creating a more profound set of feelings than a well-designed
toaster.
Sir John Soane’s Museum, the architect’s extraordinary townhouse in
London—and one of the greatest works by an architect who was one of the
most brilliant and original design forces to have come out of Georgian
London—contains a room that can make this clear. It was Soane’s breakfast
room, and it is fairly small, with a round table set under a low dome that is
not a real dome but a canopy, supported by narrow columns at four corners.
Where the canopy meets the corners, Soane placed small, round mirrors, so
that the occupants of the breakfast table can see one another without looking
directly at each other. The yellowish walls are lined with bookcases and
paintings, and natural light tumbles in softly beside the canopy, indirectly,
from above. Soane liked to create rooms within rooms and spaces that
connect in unusual ways with other spaces, and in the breakfast room you can
see that he is doing it not just as the early-nineteenth-century’s version of
razzle-dazzle but to provide a kind of psychic comfort. The dome is
protecting, but it is not quite enclosing, a reminder that while we may feel
uncommunicative and vulnerable early in the morning, we need to move out
of that stage into the world. The breakfast room functions as a kind of
halfway house, cozy in a way that other, more formal spaces tend not to be,
and soft in the way it introduces us to the day. It is a room of great beauty and
serenity, perfectly balanced between openness and enclosure, between public
and private. The British architecture critic Ian Nairn was exaggerating only
somewhat when he called the breakfast room “probably the deepest
penetration of space and of man’s position in space, and hence in the world,
that any architect has ever created.”
In the breakfast room, Soane used architecture to fulfill a routine function
and create a powerful, almost transcendent experience at the same time. For
me there are other buildings, too, that achieve the extraordinary as they fulfill
a function that, in and of itself, is perfectly ordinary. In 1929, when Mies van
der Rohe was asked to create a small pavilion to represent Germany at the
world exposition in Barcelona, he produced a sublime composition of glass,
marble, steel, and concrete, arranged to appear almost as if the elements
were flat planes floating in space. The white, flat roof and the walls of green
marble with stainless steel columns in front of them combine to have
immense sensual power, a tiny exhibit pavilion in which you feel an entire
world of continuous, floating space, and one of the first modern buildings
anywhere to convey a sense of richness and luxury amid great restraint—a
building that in some ways has more in common, at least spiritually, with the
spare classical architecture of Japan.

Sir John Soane, breakfast room, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
 The Great Workroom of the Johnson Wax Administration Building in
Racine, Wisconsin, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and finished a decade
later, in 1939, had an even more mundane purpose, which was to house
clerical employees. Wright created an enormous, altogether spectacular room
of light and swirling curves under a translucent ceiling. The room was lined
in brick with clerestory windows of translucent Pyrex tubes, and its structure
was supported on a forest of slender, tapering columns, each of which was
topped by a huge, round disc, like a lily pad of concrete floating in the
translucent ceiling. The space looks, even now, like a futurist fantasy; it must
have been altogether astonishing in the 1930s. While Wright’s specially
designed typing chairs and steel worktables were less than functional and the
room, though awash in natural light, allowed no views to the exterior—this
was Frank Lloyd Wright’s world you were in, and not for an instant would he
let you forget it—the Johnson Wax building still gave typists a modern
cathedral, an ennobling place, in which to work.

Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona Pavilion

 Frank Lloyd Wright, Great Workroom, Johnson Wax headquarters, Racine,
Wisconsin

Another example, quite different, but worth discussing in more detail,

since it is perhaps the building where, at least in the United States,
architectural form and symbol come together with a more serene grace than
in any other: the original campus of the University of Virginia at
Charlottesville, by Thomas Jefferson. Designed when Jefferson was seventy-
four, the “academical village,” as he liked to call it, consists of two parallel
rows of five classical houses, called pavilions, connected by low,
colonnaded walkways, which face each other across a wide, magnificently
proportioned grassy lawn. At the head of the lawn, presiding over the entire
composition, is the Rotunda, a domed structure he based on the Pantheon in
Rome.
Each pavilion is designed according to a different classical motif, so that
together they constitute a virtual education in classical architecture: the
directness and simplicity of the Doric order, the richness of the Corinthian,
can here be compared in what amounts to a Jeffersonian fugue of classical
variations. As Jefferson conceived it, the Rotunda served as the library,
which was a splendid piece of symbolism, for it turned the form used to
honor the ancient gods into a temple of the book and then gave that temple
pride of place in the composition.
There are other kinds of symbolism, too: the pavilions, with their great
stylistic range, stand as a kind of beginning of the American tendency to pick
and choose from history, shaping the styles of the past to our own purposes.
And the pavilions (which originally housed the faculty) and the students’
rooms set behind, connected by colonnaded walkways, meant that the
university lived together as a community.
The whole place is a lesson, not just in the didactic sense of the classical
orders, but in a thousand subtler ways as well. Ultimately the University of
Virginia is an essay in balance—balance between the built world and the
natural one, between the individual and the community, between past and
present, between order and freedom. There is order to the buildings, freedom
to the lawn itself—but as the buildings order and define and enclose the great
open space, so does the space make the buildings sensual and rich. Neither
the buildings nor the lawn would have any meaning without the other, and the
dialogue they enter into is a sublime composition.
The lawn is terraced, so that it steps down gradually as it moves away
from the Rotunda, adding a whole other rhythm to the composition. The lawn
is a room, and the sky its ceiling; I know of few other outdoor places
anywhere where the sense of architectural space can be so intensely felt.

Thomas Jefferson, the Lawn, University of Virginia, Charlottesville

In Jefferson’s buildings, there are other kinds of balances as well—

between the icy coolness of the white-painted stone and the warm redness of
the brick, between the sumptuousness of the Corinthian order and the restraint
of the Doric, between the rhythms of the columns, marching on and on down
the lawn, and the masses of the pavilions. In the late afternoon light all this
can tug at your heart, and you feel that you can touch that light, dancing on
those columns, making the brick soft and rich. There is awesome beauty here,
but also utter clarity. It becomes clear that Jefferson created both a total
abstraction and a remarkably literal expression of an idea. Architecture has
rarely been as sure of itself, as creative, as inventive, and as relaxed as it is
here.

We certainly could not live with constant attention to music and would surely
tune out even the loveliest sounds if we were surrounded by them at every
moment, as we are by architecture. Because architecture is omnipresent, it
obliges us to stop seeing it. We cannot take it in constantly at its highest level
of intensity, as we have seen. And yet we cannot not take it in, either. All
architecture, from art at its highest to the architecture that barely makes it
over the threshold of intention, shapes the world in which we live most of
our lives. With one foot necessarily in the real world, it straddles the gap
between reality and dreams. To be engaged with architecture is to be
engaged with almost everything else as well: culture, society, politics,
business, history, family, religion, education. Every building exists to house
something, and what it houses is itself part of the pursuit of architecture. The
joy of architecture as art is only an aspect of the experience of architecture,
profound though it may be; there is also great satisfaction to understanding
the built environment as a form of engagement with every other function
imaginable.
Architecture is social as well as individual: as it exists in physical reality,
it exists in social reality, too. Two people can experience a work of
architecture as differently as they can experience a painting or a symphony,
but the way architecture enforces social interaction, imposing a common
experience despite the possible differences in judgment that may result, is
unique. It takes many people to make a work of architecture and many people
to use one. The novel may reach its fullest meaning when read by a single
person, acting alone; but the concert hall or museum or office building or
even private house derives much of its meaning from the social acts that
occur within it and from how its physical form is intricately involved in
those social acts. When we see a concert hall empty, after hours, we can
appreciate its physical form, but we see it as a vacuum, cut off from its
purpose, and thus we barely see it at all. Even a cathedral—which
architectural pilgrims are most likely to visit at quiet times and which may
confer extraordinary gifts of intimacy on the solitary visitor—rises to yet
another level of meaning when we experience it filled with worshipers.
 Architecture is the ultimate physical representation of a culture, more so
than even its flag. The White House, the Capitol, the Houses of Parliament,
the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, the Brandenburg Gate, St. Basil’s Cathedral,
the Sydney Opera House, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge.
The list could expand to thousands of structures, and they need not be
celebrated ones; county courthouses and town halls in small communities
everywhere can possess the same qualities and convey the same meaning:
architecture is a powerful icon because it represents common experience,
more so than any other art, and resonates more than most other aspects of
common cultural experience. A flag is a relatively simple object whose
entire effect lies in its blunt, direct, and total symbolism, but architecture
functions as a different kind of icon. It is complicated, experienced over
time, and generally large enough to be perceived in very different ways by
different people, however much they may share a commitment to its iconic
status. Every work of architecture, whatever its symbolic associations, also
exists as an aesthetic experience, as pure physical sensation. The White
House is four walls, a portico, some severe Georgian detailing, and some
splendid rooms full of elegant objects and decoration, and while only a
Martian unaware of its history could perceive it only as a pure object, no one
can perceive it only as pure symbol, either. Every iconic piece of
architecture speaks to us simultaneously as both form and symbol.
When a work of architecture functions as icon, then it matters in a
different kind of way from other buildings. The power of architectural icons
is undiminished today, even as so many other symbols of our culture appear
to weaken. We can see this not only in the continued magnetic pull of such
places as the White House and the Capitol—a pull that seems undiminished
by the cynicism with which voters regard the occupants of these buildings
and the political events that go on inside them—but also in the ascension to
iconic status of the World Trade Center after its destruction on September 11,
2001, when tragic circumstances led the United States to embrace, surely for
the first time, an enormous, modernist, commercial building and confer on it
all of the symbolic meaning that is often reserved for more traditional kinds
of architecture. (For years after September 11, sidewalk vendors in New
York were selling pictures of the World Trade Center in the way that they
once sold pictures of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr.) That it took
martyrdom to render the Twin Towers beloved and to make people view
them as being as fundamentally an American symbol as the Lincoln Memorial
is not surprising, of course, not only because Americans have always had a
certain conflict with modernism—we want to be seen as advanced, indeed as
the most advanced culture there is, but at the same time we have always been
most comfortable keeping one foot in the past, like Jefferson seeking to move
forward by adopting and reinventing what has come before, not by breaking
with tradition. For many Americans, before September 11, Colonial
Williamsburg probably felt like a more natural symbol of the country than did
a very tall box of glass and steel.
The risks of breaking with history were clear in the saga surrounding
another important icon, the work of architecture that is probably the first
modernist civic monument to achieve any degree of iconic status in the
United States: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., by Maya
Lin, completed in 1981. This is also worth discussing in detail, since it is an
extraordinary story, and not only because Lin was a twenty-one-year-old
student when she designed it. When the jury of an architectural competition
selected Lin’s design—a pair of two-hundred-foot-long black granite walls
that join to form a V which embraces a gently sloping plot of ground—what
troubled many people was not Lin’s age but her reliance on abstraction.
Where were the statues, where were the traditional symbols? The fact that
Lin proposed to give the memorial a sense of immediacy and connection to
the dead by carving the names of all 57,692 Americans who were killed in
Vietnam from 1963 to 1973 into the granite did not seem, to some people,
sufficient to remove it from what they considered the realm of cold,
impersonal abstraction. The project went ahead only after a compromise led
to the addition of a statue of soldiers and a flagpole at some distance from the
wall. But once the memorial was built, it turned out to be Lin’s original
design—the wall of names—that possesses the real emotional power, not the
mawkish, literalizing elements added for fear the wall would not speak
clearly enough. The latter have turned out to be superfluous to the original
design, which appears to speak more clearly to great numbers of people than
any other abstract work in the United States today.
By traditional measures the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is not architecture
at all—it has no roof, no doors, no interior. It does not pretend to be a
building. But it employs the techniques of architecture to what can only be
called the highest and most noble civic purpose, and does so more
successfully than almost anything else built in our age. Indeed, it stands, quite
simply, as the most important evidence the late twentieth century produced
that design can still serve as a unifying social force.
At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, monumentality creates a true public
realm, public not only in the sense of ownership but also in that of
intellectual and emotional connection. The memorial is public, people feel,
because it is about them, and its physical form touches their souls. This
memorial has the power to move people of startlingly different backgrounds
and political views, and it performs this difficult task of making common
experience when society seems infinitely fragmented. This work of
architecture provides common ground.
The wide V shape of the wall is subtly sited: one arm of the wall points
toward the Washington Monument, the other to the Lincoln Memorial, tying
the memorial—and by implication the tragedy of Vietnam—to the landmarks
of official Washington, and hence to the epic of our history. The memorial is
not conspicuous from afar, since it does not rise much above ground level at
all: it may be one of the few great architectural works anywhere whose
approach is marked only by directional signs, not by a glimpse of the thing
itself. You approach through the Mall, the monumental axial green space of
Washington, which recedes into the background as the wall becomes visible,
just a sliver at first, and then larger. It is not huge, and at the beginning, where
it is just a thin slice of granite connected to the ground, it seems tiny. As you
walk beside it and the ground descends, the wall grows in height; more and
more names of the dead appear, chronologically listed, until suddenly the
wall begins to loom large and there is a sense that you have gone deeper into
the abyss of war as you descend further into the ground and Washington itself
disappears. Then, as you turn the corner at the center of the memorial, you
begin to move slowly back upward again, toward the light, the sun, and the
city—and you realize that, metaphorically at least, you have undergone a
passage toward redemption.
 Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C.

Literal honor to the dead through the presence of their names;

metaphorical representation of the war as a descent from which the nation
rose again; symbolic connections to the larger world. What more could we
ask? There is beauty here, and room for each of us to think our own thoughts,
and the brilliance of a design that reminds us at every moment that private
loss and public tragedy are irrevocably joined.

Monuments as powerful, as subtle, and as successful at appealing to a wide

range of people as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial are rare in any period. All
buildings have some symbolic meaning, however, even if it is more
conventional and more common than the symbolism of a great memorial, and
the question worth asking is how effectively does a piece of architecture
carry out its symbolic role—how well does it communicate whatever
message it may have that goes beyond the purely functional, beyond even the
aesthetic appeal of its physical form? Frank Lloyd Wright, for all his
determination to reinvent the form of the single-family house, was
passionately devoted to the very traditional idea of the house as a symbol of
the nuclear family, and almost all of his houses had large fireplaces, either as
the dominant elements of the main living space or set off in inglenooks of
their own, all to emphasize the connection between home and hearth. (Wright
liked to present himself as a radical outsider, but he was less interested in
changing society than in changing architecture, and he tended to believe that
the best way to keep the American agrarian, family tradition strong was to
house it in new architectural form created specifically for the American
continent rather than transported from elsewhere. It was a case of radical art
for a more conservative end than Wright wanted people to believe.)
Think, for a moment, about another of the most common building types, the
bank. Once, most American banks tended to be serious, classically inspired
buildings, civic presences symbolizing both the stature of the bank in a
community and protection for the hoard of cash within. Who would doubt that
their money is safer in a limestone temple or an Italian Renaissance palazzo
than in a storefront? Traditional architectural style served a powerful
symbolic purpose here, in the same way it always has in religious buildings.
Today, banks are vast national or international corporate enterprises, not
local ones, and most cash exists electronically. How do you create an
architectural expression for the protection of blips on a computer screen?
Surely not by building a replica of a Greek temple on Main Street. And cash
itself now is generally dispensed not from a bank vault but from an ATM, a
vending machine device that demands no architectural expression at all, save
for a wall onto which it can be installed.
I mention all of this not to say what banks should or should not look like,
and certainly not to deny that there is still great symbolic power present in
some of the fine old banks that previous generations have handed down to us,
but to underscore how social and technological change affects architectural
meaning. A grand and sumptuous classical bank may still give pleasure as a
monumental artifact, but that is about all; customers in it today are not likely
to feel the sense of protection that the building was intended to give, largely
because they no longer need or seek such protection in an age of electronic
banking. We may even feel a greater sense of emotion in experiencing the
glory of an old bank as a piece of monumental architecture than previous
generations did in experiencing it as a place of safety and security—but that
is beside the point. Even if we find the old bank exhilarating, it has a
different meaning as a work of architecture now than before. (And it often
has a very different function, too. In New York, several of the city’s finest old
banks have been converted into catering halls, party spaces which
underscore that the buildings now exist for pleasure, not necessity.)
So how, then, does one design a bank today? The “icon,” or symbol on the
computer screen, that Microsoft Money uses to denote that its online banking
system is working is a line moving back and forth between a miniature house
and a miniature classical temple—data being transferred from home to bank,
or vice versa. No one looking at such a screen could doubt what those icons
represent, and they stand as confirmation that the symbolic power of the
classical bank remains a part of collective memory, and hence still has
practical application, even in an age in which the traditional function of the
bank has changed altogether.
But is this a sign of weakness or of strength? Does the fact that the
classical bank has been reduced to the status of an icon on a computer screen
confirm its continued vitality as a symbol or make it no more than a cartoon?
Something of both, I suspect. But what the computer icon really proves is that
our age has not yet been able to create any architectural image for the bank
that is nearly as potent as the traditional one. We still use the classical bank
when we need to create an image that says “bank,” even though we do not use
the classical bank much any more when we want to make a real bank because
it has so little connection to the realities of how banking is done.
Occasionally banks are built today that self-consciously evoke the
monumental grandeur of the old classical ones. But their designs, however
well meaning, cannot be the same as the ones that have survived from the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for classical banks built in an age of
cyberspace become, in effect, exercises in nostalgia. They do not emerge
from the conditions that gave birth to the great bank buildings of the past,
when cash needed physical protection and society understood and respected
the idea that a bank was the architectural expression of that act of protection.
Today, building that kind of old-fashioned bank may represent an earnest
yearning for that time, but it is unlikely to be convincing in the way that a
surviving older bank is. Yearning is rarely enough to confer architectural
meaning on its own, which is why such buildings often end up as three-
dimensional versions of the computer icon—cartoons built of stone.
 This is not to deny the complexity of the problem of creating a decent,
appealing architecture that expresses the conditions of the moment. When
banking is less and less a matter of tangible goods—that is, cash—it is less
and less easy to give it meaningful architectural representation. Not for
nothing have even great banking institutions come to look more and more like
offices and branch banks more like storefronts, and even the ones that work
reasonably well have given up on almost any level of architectural ambition.
Of course, this is fitting symbolism in itself: the reality is a certain banality,
much as the great architectural critic Lewis Mumford noted half a century ago
when he reviewed the United Nations headquarters and observed that the
most conspicuous element of the complex was not a tower or an assembly
hall but the Secretariat skyscraper, a perfect symbol, Mumford said, of the
triumph of the bureaucracy. So, too, are banks as storefront offices and ATMs
perfect symbols of the evolution of banking away from the real—cash—and
to the virtual world of electronic transactions.

When Vitruvius, writing in ancient Rome, dictated that architecture should

provide “commodity, firmness, and delight,” he also said that architecture
was, in effect, the beginning of civilization and that all other arts and fields
of study connected to it and were descended from it—an observation that, as
architectural historian Fil Hearn wrote in Ideas That Shaped Buildings,
“offered the art of building perhaps the highest encomium it has ever
received,” rendering the architect, in effect, the keeper of civilization.
(Vitruvius’s work consisted of ten sections and included long discussions
about the classical orders, about the proper way to build temples,
amphitheaters, and houses, and about materials and the siting of cities.)
But if Vitruvius can be considered the beginning, or the foundation, of
architectural theory, it was a foundation with not much built upon it for more
than fifteen hundred years. In the Middle Ages, great engineer-architects built
some of the most extraordinary structures that have ever existed, but they did
not codify their ideas into long treatises, as Vitruvius had done. The notion
that one could prescribe in words an ideal way of building, and a purpose for
architecture, returned in the Renaissance, when Vitruvius was rediscovered
and used as a model for an updated treatise by Leon Battista Alberti in the
middle of the fifteenth century. Alberti urged a return to a classical
architecture based on the buildings of ancient Rome, not just because he
found classicism aesthetically appealing, but because he believed that in
building correctly lay virtue. “Alberti felt impelled to cite the benefits to
society of beautiful, well-planned buildings: they give pleasure; they enhance
civic pride; they confer dignity and honor on the community; if sacred, they
encourage piety; and they may even move an enemy to refrain from damaging
them,” Fil Hearn has written, noting that Alberti also observed that the
architect had the potential to affect national security as much as a general and
to improve his country as much as an artist. Alberti seems to have had as
pure and natural an understanding of the balance between aesthetics and
practical, not to say political, matters as any architect ever has. He
celebrated the artistic side of architecture and claimed that architecture owed
more to painting than to anything else. Yet he ranked mathematics as nearly as
important and proposed precise, mathematical explanations of proportion.
And he understood the relation between architecture and power as clearly as
Machiavelli.
It is hard to overestimate Alberti’s importance. In an essay in the New
York Review, the art historian Joseph Connors summed up Alberti with
precision and elegance, writing that out of his “mixture of erudition, logic
and experience came prescient ideas that would transform architecture.
Beauty is not the same as ornament. The beautiful is that which cannot be
changed except for the worse; a beautiful building is one to which nothing
can be added and from which nothing can be taken away. Modest materials
arranged in proportionate relationships are more likely to be beautiful than
rich materials badly arranged. The eye can perceive harmony just like the
ear. Churches should be austere and dark; shadows induce a sense of sacred
fear and the finest ornament in a place of worship is a flame. Palace planning
should reflect degrees of distance between the ruler and his subjects. The
house is like a small city, and the city a large house. Nature delights in the
measure and the mean, and so should the architect. Beauty has the power to
disarm the raging barbarian; there is no greater security against violence and
injury than beauty and dignity.”
Alberti may have erred on the side of earnestness, not to say naïveté, in
his confidence that architectural beauty could protect a civilization—his
Machiavellian pragmatism seems to have been limited to the process of
making buildings, not to their effects. Still, I am not sure there has ever been
a more elegant and concise set of architectural directions. Alberti’s writing
inspired numerous other odes to classicism, most famously the Four Books
of Architecture, by Andrea Palladio, the great sixteenth-century builder of
Italian country villas. Palladio presented his own work as evidence of his
theoretical ideas, thus beginning the practice of architects writing books in
which they attempt to articulate ideal ways of building and then show their
own buildings, presumably as a demonstration of these ideal notions.
Palladio’s treatise was as important as his buildings in establishing him as a
central figure in Western architecture and in giving us the adjective
“Palladian” to attach to a certain kind of symmetrical, classically inspired
villa, generally with a pedimented temple front.
The notion that there is a right way to build—morally and ethically, that
is, not structurally—is really the basis of most architectural theory that has
followed. In England, A. W. N. Pugin in the 1830s and 1840s argued that
Gothic, not classical, architecture was the road to civic good, social virtue,
and, most important, godliness. For Pugin, an intense Roman Catholic, Gothic
was the only true religious architecture, period. He worked with Charles
Barry, the architect of the Houses of Parliament, and designed most of the
interiors and much of the architectural detail in Parliament, but beyond
working on this building and designing a few of his own, Pugin played a
major role as a theorist in creating the Gothic Revival. It is no exaggeration
to say that the close connection between the Gothic style and churches that
still exists today is due in large part to forces Pugin helped set in motion.
(Say “church,” and it is highly likely that something at least loosely
resembling Gothic architecture will come into your mind.) Pugin was aided
by John Ruskin, whose long treatises The Seven Lamps of Architecture and
The Stones of Venice, surely the most ambitious architectural writing since
Palladio, extended the argument beyond architecture’s influence over what
we might call the external morality of society into the idea that there is also a
morality within a structure itself. Ruskin said that Gothic architecture, by
virtue of the fact that it was honest, clear, and direct in its use of structure and
materials, had a whole other kind of morality to it, beyond that conferred by
its traditions and its close connection to the church. Nature, Ruskin thought,
provided the proper model for building. “An architect should live as little in
our cities as a painter,” Ruskin wrote. “Send him to our hills, and let him
study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.” To
Ruskin, not only structure but every material used in building had its own
integrity, which dictated how it should be properly used, a notion that would
come to be particularly important to modernist architects. He disliked
surface decoration and argued for plain, workaday buildings for ordinary
purposes, and he believed that real architecture—which is to say Gothic-
style architecture—should be reserved for noble, civic, or sacred purpose.
Most buildings, of course, were not designed to demonstrate theories, and
in the late nineteenth century, many architects who designed Gothic-style
buildings did so because they were the fashion, and that was enough. The
concept that there was some sort of moral integrity to “honest” structure did
not hold water with most architects, and all kinds of buildings were
produced in all kinds of styles, many of the best of them having nothing
whatsoever to do with these ideas. Decoration, harmonious proportions,
comfortable scale were all notions that were only occasionally connected to
structural honesty, but to many architects, they meant a lot more. The architect
and critic Russell Sturgis wrote that the typical public building was designed
to be “a box with a pretty inside, put into another box with a pretty outside,”
and never mind any rational connection between the two. Still, Ruskin’s
writing had considerable influence. It led directly to what became known as
the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, led by William Morris, which
called for a revival of craftsmanship, something it saw as closely connected
to the principles of honesty and directness that Ruskin believed gave
buildings integrity. Ruskin’s notion that there is such a thing as a building
itself being moral or inherently honest was picked up by Eugène-Emmanuel
Viollet-le-Duc, a French theorist who carried it still further and argued that
architecture had an obligation to be rational. Viollet-le-Duc, too, was taken
by Gothic architecture and saw honesty rather than mystery in it. His case for
structural rationality set out the beginning tenets of what would become the
underlying argument of almost every modern architect.
Some, like the Viennese architect Adolf Loos, whose most famous essay
was called “Ornament and Crime,” took Viollet-le-Duc’s theory to the next
level and put the issue of morality back on the table. Decoration was not only
misguided and old-fashioned, Loos said, it was immoral, and he argued for
an austere architecture as the only form of design suitable to the modern age.
The great French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier, in Towards a New
Architecture and When the Cathedrals Were White, as well as the Italian
futurist Antonio Sant’Elia and the German architect Walter Gropius, saw the
machine as the great inspiration of the age and urged architects to follow it,
not by making their designs literally machinelike, but by giving them the
directness and lack of extraneous elements that characterized machines. They
were not troubled by the fact that the notion that a building had an obligation
to be direct and clear in its structure—to reveal itself, so to speak, rather
than to hide itself behind the clutter of decoration—had actually emerged out
of the architectural theory of Gothicists like Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc and
was not in and of itself an argument for designing buildings that would not
look like anything that had come before. But it became one, as modernists
used these notions to create a rationale for rejecting history and designing as
if with a clean slate. Sigfried Giedion would attempt to give all of this
further justification in his epic work Space, Time and Architecture: The
Growth of a New Tradition, published in 1941, which argued that a cool,
austere, somewhat abstract modernism was the culmination of the history of
Western architecture. To Giedion, the architectural past was, quite literally,
prologue, and he saw architectural history as a straight line pointing
inevitably toward the modernist architecture of the twentieth century.
Curiously, Frank Lloyd Wright, who would ultimately be identified more
with his claims that the flowing, open, horizontal space of his “Prairie
Houses” and other buildings represented the expression of a quintessentially
American impulse, also made similar arguments about the machine, and even
before the Europeans did. In a remarkable lecture called “The Art and Craft
of the Machine,” delivered at Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago in 1901,
Wright talked about Gutenberg, the inventor of movable type, and made the
extraordinary observation that the printed book was, in a sense, the first
machine and that its arrival profoundly changed architecture. It was not the
printing press itself that Wright was calling a machine, it was the book. He
owed, and acknowledged, a certain debt in this point, of course, to Victor
Hugo, who made a somewhat similar observation in The Hunchback of
Notre Dame, but Wright’s way of expressing this point was very much his
own. Before printed books, Wright said, “all the intellectual forces of the
people converged to one point—architecture. Down to the fifteenth century
the chief register of humanity is architecture.” Wright referred to the most
important pieces of architecture as “great granite books” and said that “down
to the time of Gutenberg architecture is the principal writing—the universal
writing of humanity.” But with the arrival of printing, Wright said, “Human
thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself still more simple and easy.
Architecture is dethroned. Gutenberg’s letters of lead are about to supersede
Orpheus’s letters of stone. The book is about to kill the edifice,” he
concluded, here reworking Hugo’s phrase literally.
 Wright’s theory ignores the oral tradition of literature, which allowed
words to become part of cultural history even before the invention of the
printing press. Like almost everything Wright wrote, this lecture is wildly
overstated, full of Whitmanesque hyperbole. But for all of that, it remains an
astonishing observation, for in a way it is the beginning of the modern
connection between media and architecture. Wright was acting on the
presumption that architecture was a form of communication, a radical thought
indeed for 1901—architecture as media. “The Art and Craft of the Machine,”
then, can be viewed as an early example—perhaps the early example—of the
notion of architecture as media, which today, when we think of almost
everything in terms of its implications for information technology, is
astonishing. Wright was viewing architecture as a system by which the
culture preserved and extended itself—in fact, as the primary system by
which the culture did this, since Wright saw art and sculpture as subsidiary to
architecture, as merely tools in its arsenal of communication. Sometimes
buildings literally did tell stories (the iconography of the Gothic cathedrals is
the most potent example), although I imagine Wright was thinking not only in
such literal terms but also about the architectural experience itself, as well as
about the notion that the creation of structure and space was a form of
communication and a way of conveying cultural values between the
generations. Now, as I said, architecture was not the only system of
preserving culture, as Wright would have had us believe, but there is no
question that it was a very powerful one, and Wright’s notion that the power
of architecture was diminished by the way in which the printing press
allowed an alternative means for ideas to become widely disseminated
stands as an extraordinary moment in the evolution of thinking about the
purpose of architecture.
Wright went on to say that architecture had been so weakened by invention
of the printing press that architects felt there was little to do beyond copying
the styles of the past and that only now, with the coming of modern
architecture, was the field of architecture in a position to resume its former
role as a central pursuit in society. Wright’s notion that everything between
the Gothic cathedrals and the twentieth century was an architectural
wasteland is absurd, of course. But he did identify an issue that remains as
sharp a sign of division today as ever, which is the question of how important
it is for architects to invent something new, and that even if you do not
consider reusing an architectural style from the past to be immoral, as Wright
and the other modernists did, is it nevertheless a lesser pursuit than designing
something new and different? Is there such a thing as a “style for the time,” as
modernists liked to say?
Most architectural theories of modern times, as throughout history, have
been attempts to justify a particular style. Ruskin, Morris, and Wright, for all
they talked of architecture as being determined by moral principles and of its
critical role as an exemplar of society’s aims, were no exceptions.
Aesthetics, and the wish that buildings look a particular way, almost always
provided the underlying, if sometimes unspoken, rationale behind
architectural theory. Ruskin all but admitted this when he said, “Taste is the
only morality. Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.”
But if we are thinking about what architecture means in our culture, the
discussion cannot begin and end with aesthetics. What of the purpose of
architecture in solving social problems, in housing the poor, in creating
civilized environments for teaching and learning? Don’t architects have a
responsibility to make the world better, as Vitruvius and Alberti would
remind us? Does an ugly public housing project that provides a home for fifty
families not serve a larger purpose than a more attractive one that gives only
twenty families a roof over their heads? Wasn’t it the job of architects to try
and solve the problem of rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina?
The answer is yes, and no. When the professional expertise of architects
can provide answers to social problems that would otherwise not be found,
as in creating attractive, buildable, affordable housing in New Orleans, or in
designing viable temporary housing after an earthquake, or in figuring out a
way to lay out a school or a hospital to maximize the satisfaction it will give
to the people who use it, then architecture is fulfilling a social responsibility.
But architects are not makers of public policy, and while they can design
whatever they please, they can build only what a client wants to pay for. It is
not the architect’s role to solve the problem of housing the poor. It is the
architect’s role to give the poor the very best housing possible when society
decides that it is ready to address this urgent problem. The same applies for
education and health care and every other social need that can be satisfied, in
part, by more and better buildings: it is the job of architects to design the best
buildings, the most beautiful and civilized and useful ones, but society must
be willing to address these problems before the architect can do his or her
best work. In Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Robert
Venturi’s seminal work of theory, published in 1966—a book that is
preoccupied primarily with aesthetics and is a potent and eloquent attack on
the stark simplicity of much modernist architecture—Venturi took note of the
rising tide of demands in the 1960s that architects assume a broader role.
“The architect’s ever diminishing power and his growing ineffectualness in
shaping the whole environment can perhaps be reversed, ironically, by
narrowing his concerns and concentrating on his own job,” Venturi wrote.
His point was that the best way for an architect to fulfill his or her social
responsibility is simply to build better buildings.
No one would deny that, but is it enough? Today, there is more public
interest in new architecture than ever, and as we build museums, performing
arts centers, academic buildings, and houses as one-of-a-kind, special
monuments, it is easy to think of architecture only as an elaborately wrought
physical object—as pure form—and not as a structure created to make a
social statement of some kind. Architecture can, after all, provide a model
for a way to live, or be a source of solutions to social problems. Karsten
Harries, a contemporary philosopher with a particular interest in art and
architecture, took some issue with the extent to which we, as a society, seem
in thrall to eye-grabbing architecture in his book The Ethical Function of
Architecture, which did not reject aesthetics so much as try to broaden the
discussion. Architecture is too obsessed with form for its own sake, Harries
argued. Architecture matters because it has responsibilities to society that are
far broader than the making of even the most beautiful forms and shapes. To
Harries, Nikolaus Pevsner’s famous line about Lincoln Cathedral and the
bicycle shed was wrong, not so much because it created a falsely simple
distinction between architecture and building, but because its underlying
rationale was limited to the way a building looked. Architecture, Harries
wrote, “has to free itself from the aesthetic approach, which also means
freeing itself from an understanding of the work of architecture as
fundamentally just a decorated shed.”
The aesthetic approach can also give architecture a hermetic quality, in
which architecture becomes directed less to social needs than toward
theoretical ideas and pure form. Architectural theory is capable of being a
profound quest, but architecture is not, in the end, philosophical. There is
always room for architecture that comments on other architecture and for
architecture that is created mainly to promulgate an idea about architecture.
But finally architecture is not about itself. As I said at the beginning of this
chapter, it is about everything else. It is never a neutral envelope. It is always
made to contain something, and to understand architecture fully you have to
understand more than architecture. You have to understand something about
what is going to be contained within a building, whether it is theater or
medicine or high finance or baseball. You don’t have to be able to conduct
Mass to design a Catholic church or be able to direct Hamlet to design a
theater, but if you have no interest whatsoever in the act of worship or the art
of the theater, something important is likely to be lost. You don’t need to be
Derek Jeter to design a baseball park, but if you do not understand the game
and know what it is like to sit for nine innings in what A. Bartlett Giamatti,
the former Yale president turned baseball commissioner, once called “that
simulacrum of a city … a green expanse, complete and coherent,
shimmering,” then you will not be able to design a baseball park as it should
be. This is much more than a matter of providing commodity in the Vitruvian
sense, much more than making sure that a building functions well on a
practical level. Architecture exists to enable other things, and it is enriched
by its intimate connection to those other things. To study school buildings is,
in part, to study education; to study hospitals is, in part, to study medicine.
The tie between architecture and the things it contains makes architecture
different from anything else. Nothing else, you could say, is about everything.
Still, architecture is art, and as I will argue in the rest of this book, in the
final analysis we cannot not view it through an aesthetic lens. But of course
architecture also is not art. Karsten Harries proposed what he called the
ethical approach to architecture in response to this paradox and as the
alternative to the temptation to view architecture purely as aesthetics. An
ethical approach to architecture, he said, should show us our place in the
world and, Harries wrote, paraphrasing an idea put forth a generation earlier
by Sigfried Giedion, “should speak to us of how we are to live in the
contemporary world.” Such architecture is invariably public, not private, and
as such, it makes a statement about the importance of community; it is
common ground, and it inspires us. “Architecture has an ethical function in
that it calls us out of the everyday, recalls us to the values presiding over our
lives as members of a society; it beckons us toward a better life, a bit closer
to the ideal,” Harries wrote. “One task of architecture is to preserve at least
a piece of utopia, and inevitably such a piece leaves and should leave a
sting, awaken utopian longings, fill us with dreams of another and better
world.”
 I like Harries’s notion of an ethical architecture, since it seems to say
implicitly that even though architecture is an aesthetic experience, it is not in
the same category as art and music. Rather, it is a way of providing
something we absolutely need, and not a luxury that we can afford to give up
in the face of stress and difficulty. Indeed, you could argue that an ethical
architecture is more essential, not less essential, in times of difficulty, that it
can rise to its greatest potential and be a symbol of what we want and what
we aspire to, as so few other things can. It is not for nothing that Abraham
Lincoln insisted that the building of the great dome of the Capitol continue
during the Civil War, even though manpower was scarce and money scarcer
still; he knew that the rising dome was a symbol of the nation coming together
and that no words could have the same effect on the psyche of the country that
the physical reality of this building could. Lincoln knew, I suspect, that even
the most eloquent words would not be present and in front of us all the time,
the way the building would be. And Lincoln knew also that there was value
in making new symbols as well as in preserving older ones and that building
the dome was a way of affirming a belief in the future.
It is hard to think of a more ethical approach to architecture than that. We
build, in the end, because we believe in a future—nothing shows commitment
to the future like architecture. And we build well because we believe in a
better future, because we believe that there are few greater gifts we can give
the generations that will follow us than great works of architecture, both as a
symbol of our aspirations of community and as a symbol of our belief not
only in the power of imagination but in the ability of society to continue to
create anew. The case for architecture, if we are going to call it that, doesn’t
rest solely on the experience of being in remarkable and wonderful buildings
—those places that, as Lewis Mumford once put it, “take your breath away
with the experience of seeing form and space joyfully mastered.” But those
are the great moments of architecture, those moments that take the breath
away, and they are the most important ones, the ones that make civilization.
They are our cathedrals, both literally and figuratively, the works of
architecture that add to our culture the way that works by Beethoven or
Picasso add to our culture. To strive to make more of them is in its way an
ethical as well as an aesthetic goal, because it is a sign that we believe our
greatest places are still to be made and our greatest times are still to come.
2
challenge and comfort
I would rather sleep in the nave of Chartres Cathedral with the
nearest john two blocks down the street than in a Harvard
house with back-to-back bathrooms.
PHILIP JOHNSON

In the previous chapter I spoke of how architecture is balanced between art

and practicality, and how it can never be perceived as either art or utility but
has to be both at once. Keeping a kind of “both/and” rather than “either/or”
sense of architecture in one’s head is an essential precondition to
understanding. Still, it is the art that thrills as function never can; this is
where passion arises and what makes architecture a transcendent experience.
No one really remembers Chartres Cathedral because it housed thousands of
the faithful efficiently, or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater because it gave
the Kaufmann family of Pittsburgh a woodsy weekend retreat, or Thomas
Jefferson’s University of Virginia campus because it organized teachers and
students in an effective way, though to be sure, each of these buildings did
these things. We remember these works of architecture because they went
beyond these mundane achievements, so far beyond as to become works of
art capable of affecting vast numbers of people who were not part of these
buildings’ original communities of users at all. And they continue to affect
people, just as powerfully—if not more so—than they did when they were
new.
When architecture is art, it does not deny the ethical purpose proposed for
it by Karsten Harries, with which I ended the last chapter. Indeed, it enhances
it. What Harries calls the ethical function of architecture is necessary, and
urgent, and transcends the gap between aesthetics and practical function.
Chartres and the University of Virginia are both profoundly ethical buildings
as well as great works of art. They are both buildings in which the aesthetic
idea is deeply connected to a larger social idea and, indeed, is all but
inseparable from it. We can approach these buildings as pure form if we
wish, but we understand them far more deeply if we look at their aesthetics
as connected to the social ideas the buildings represent—ideas which, in
both of these cases, are communal and public and, in the case of Chartres,
spiritual as well. I think we could also look at Falling-water in terms of a
social idea, the notion of family and nature, of home and hearth. It is not a
public idea about community as in Chartres and the University of Virginia,
but it is an ethical idea nonetheless.
When architecture is both beautiful and ethical, it invites belief. “It is not
worth it to use marble for what you don’t believe in, but it is worth it to use
cinder blocks for that which you do believe in,” said Louis Kahn, our age’s
truest architectural prophet, in a remark that both confirms the validity of
architectural ambition and deflates pretension at the same time. Architecture
as art emerges from a desire to do more than solve a functional problem.
This deeper desire is itself, in a sense, its ethical function, a statement that
the building’s art exists not only for art’s sake but also for the sake of some
social purpose. Indeed, we might say that this is as good a definition of the
ethical function as there could be—that when architecture is art, it is not art
for art’s sake but art for social purpose.
This is all the more true because much architecture that aspires to high art
is not particularly beautiful by conventional measure. Kahn’s work provides
several vivid examples. Many of his buildings, such as his brick and
concrete Unitarian Church of 1962 in Rochester, New York, where light
washes the sanctuary as it tumbles down across raw concrete block, seem
harsh at first; it is in their haunting quality that they achieve the sublime. The
room is square, and natural light enters not through windows but indirectly
through light towers that rise above the four corners of the space, so you do
not see the source of the light but only experience it against the concrete
block. The ceiling is of poured concrete, and with the corners open to the
light towers, it appears to float over the middle of the space like a canopy.
Kahn’s Yale Art Gallery of 1953, also a building of brick with an interior
largely of concrete, has a similar roughness, and as with the Unitarian Church
its beauty does not emerge at first glance but comes only after time spent
within it. The same might be said of his dormitory at Bryn Mawr College,
Erdman Hall, a building of slate and concrete that deliberately eschews
conventional symbols of domesticity. Kahn’s buildings do not coddle us.
When architecture aspires to the seriousness of great art, it transcends
both the banality of the homogeneous urban and suburban environment, now
so drearily identical around the world, and the triviality of the theme park,
that desperate cry for a sense of place. Christian Norberg-Schulz has written
with great eloquence of the loss of sense of place in contemporary society,
calling it “the loss of the poetic, imaginative understanding of the world,”
and argues for “a return to ‘the things themselves.’ ” In Architecture:
Meaning and Place, he states that the alienation one feels in the
contemporary physical environment is, in effect, the loss of aesthetic
sensibility: “Life in fact does not consist of quantities and numbers, but of
concrete things such as people, animals, flowers and trees, of stone, earth,
wood and water, of towns, streets and houses, of sun, moon and stars, of
clouds, of night and day and changing seasons. And we are here to care for
these things.”

Louis Kahn, Unitarian Church, Rochester, New York

Many of the architectural things we love best, and care for the most, are
not of course works of art at all. Vernacular architecture, the unself-
conscious, ordinary architecture of the everyday landscape, hovers over this
book, I confess, like an old aunt, unsophisticated but with great natural
wisdom, and deeply beloved for it. It is difficult not to cherish the tile-
roofed, white houses of the Mediterranean, the shingled cottages of New
England, the brick commercial buildings of the main streets of midwestern
American cities. There is something in the way human beings are designed
that reacts well to some shapes and not others, and these time-tested
vernaculars reflect not only climactic and cultural conditions of their areas
but also these inherently appealing shapes. Forget, for a moment, the vexing
issue of McDonald’s and the highway strip. What eye does not love a red-
painted barn in a sloping meadow? It is both intrinsically attractive as a form
and soothing as a symbol of a comfortable, ordered life. So, too, is it with a
row of Italianate brownstones or a small Cape Cod cottage.
It is from the ordinary that we build perceptions and establish a
foundation on which to appreciate and understand more ambitious forms of
art. These things—architectural memories, we can call them—are the subject
of chapter 5. Such buildings ground us. But they are folk melodies, not
symphonies, and it is the point of this chapter to look more carefully at what
we mean when we elevate architecture to the highest realm of art, and how
the experience of looking at architecture as art differs from the experience of
looking at buildings constructed in any vernacular, whether it is the nearly
sublime vernacular of the New England barn or the more problematic
architecture of the contemporary landscape of strip and sprawl.
It is no easier to say what makes a work of architecture succeed as art
than to say what makes a great painting or great music. We are innately
conservative; we are most comfortable with what we already know, and the
omnipresence of vernacular building makes this even more the case with
architecture than with literature or music. Yet every so often come
innovations so powerful that they force their way through and make us see the
world differently. These changes may be small; the notion that art, even great
art, creates epiphanies is more the stuff of overblown memoirs than of real
life. Rare is the life that is transformed by exposure to a single work of art.
Yet art does change us, through exhilaration, shock, and a heightened sense of
possibility. And once we have felt these, we are no longer the same.
Kahn, the greatest American architect since Frank Lloyd Wright, used to
speak of great art not as the fulfillment of a need—“need is just so many
bananas,” he liked to say—but of the fulfillment of desire. Desire, not need,
leads to great art, Kahn said—but when the artistic achievement is great
enough, it becomes a new need. The world didn’t need Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony, Kahn said, until he wrote it. And after that, no one who ever
heard it could conceive of living without it. We began to need Beethoven, not
because of an innate need to do so, but because Beethoven’s own desire,
manifested in his art, made it so.
 And as with the Fifth Symphony, the world was never again the same after
Michelangelo’s David, or Hamlet, or Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,
or The Waste Land. And so, too, with the Pyramids and Chartres Cathedral
and Wright’s Unity Temple and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and the Seagram
Building by Mies van der Rohe and Kahn’s own Salk Institute or a hundred
other great buildings that have expanded our sense of human possibility.
Now, expanding a sense of human possibility is a lovely notion, but as a
definition of great architecture it is vague and unsatisfying, and not only
because there are disturbing as well as uplifting ways in which human
possibility can be expanded—the discovery of germ warfare, for example, is
not the same as the making of a work of art. Yet even left to its positive
connotations, this phrase suggests a kind of well-meaning, New Age mission
in which art provides a kind of warm bath, full of intellectual and spiritual
uplift. Art—art of all kinds, not just architecture—exists to challenge, not to
coddle. It often expands human possibility in ways that are hard to
understand and are troubling, even shocking, to experience. Art, at its most
important, is not merely a matter of looking at beautiful things. It can be
difficult and disturbing. It forces us to see things differently, in part by
breaking the mold of what has come before.
The new is often hard to accept; it can seem ugly or coarse. It is only
seldom seen as beautiful. “I do not think of art as Consolation. I think of it as
Creation. I think of it as an energetic space that begets energetic space,”
wrote Jeanette Winterson, who in another context observed, “The most
conservative and least interested person will probably tell you that he or she
likes Constable. But would our stalwart have liked Constable in 1824 when
he exhibited at the Paris Salon and caused a riot? … To the average eye,
now, Constable is a pretty landscape painter, not a revolutionary who daubed
bright color against bright color ungraded by chiaroscuro. We have had 150
years to get used to the man who turned his back on the studio picture, took
his easel outdoors and painted in the rapture of light. It is easy to copy
Constable. It was not easy to be Constable.”
Nor was it easy to be Joyce, or Stravinsky, or Juan Gris—or Le Corbusier
or Mies van der Rohe or Louis Kahn or Robert Venturi or Frank Gehry or
Rem Koolhaas or Zaha Hadid. In each case, artists have broken through
convention and changed our notions of what a culture can produce. Their
breakthroughs now please us and, if they remain as potent as they should,
thrill us. Yet they were almost always initially unpopular and vastly
misunderstood. And now it is not possible to imagine our culture without the
things their passions made possible.
When architecture is art, it does not escape the obligation to be practical,
and its practical shortcomings should not be forgiven. At least not entirely.
Yet neither should practical matters play the dominant role in making
judgments. It is churlish to complain that Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses leak or
that Le Corbusier’s weather badly or that Frank Gehry’s are difficult to
construct, all of which may be more or less true, but what of it? That leaky
roof is not our problem, and neither is the fact that we might not wish to live
in such a building ourselves. Le Corbusier’s extraordinary Villa Savoye,
completed in 1929 in Poissy, a suburb outside of Paris, was the subject of
angry exchanges between the architect and Madame Savoye, who considered
the house “uninhabitable,” though she lived in it for more than a decade. Her
discomfort is understandable, as was the anger felt toward Mies van der
Rohe by Edith Farnsworth, who like the Savoyes commissioned one of the
greatest houses of the twentieth century and, once living in it, found it
woefully impractical.

Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, Poissy, France

The Savoyes and Edith Farnsworth were unlucky because they had to live
with a work of art at every moment, a nearly impossible task. The rest of us
have the luxury of looking at these houses only when we want to. Some
people, of course, are capable only of looking at houses in practical terms.
When Philip Johnson’s Glass House, completed in 1949, was new, a
pretentious woman who visited this then-shocking piece of modern
architecture turned to its owner and said, “Very nice, but I couldn’t live
here.”

Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois

“I haven’t asked you to, Madam,” was Johnson’s reply.

Exactly. And if we are lucky enough to be able to appreciate Building X
or Building Y as a purely aesthetic experience, regardless of its usefulness,
so much the better. Yes, the roof leaked in the Villa Savoye, but it didn’t leak
on you or me; and the glass walls of the Farnsworth House and its lack of
screens did indeed make it exceedingly difficult to live in during the summer,
but you and I were not trying to sleep there. As no man is a hero to his valet,
few great houses are uplifting works of art to the people who live in them:
these people are simply too close, and because they are there at every
moment, they have no choice but to think of comfort. The rest of us can think
of challenge, and of beauty, and treat them as works of genius, which are
often incompatible with the demands of daily life. We enjoy the freedom of
adventuring among masterpieces, to paraphrase Anatole France’s definition
of a critic’s work, and keep in mind that the greatest joy of architecture is in
the discovery of its ability to be art.
The point I am trying to make is that the notion of challenge that is so
closely bound to the experience of art presents a particular dilemma so far as
architecture is concerned, for architecture is necessarily ill at ease, if not
incompatible, with it. If great art exists to challenge rather than coddle—or,
in Jeanette Winter-son’s terms, as creation rather than as consolation—then
what of architecture’s obligation to provide shelter and comfort? Unlike art
or literature, architecture must protect us from the elements, and it is
omnipresent within our view. It must, in some way, console us, for its job is
to protect us. We cannot live with architecture as constant challenge, any
more than we can approach James Joyce as escape reading or treat John
Cage as elevator music. Art demands attention, and architecture’s constant
presence in our lives makes constant attention to it impossible. This is
actually true of every kind of architecture, from buildings that are designed
only for comfort to the ones designed mainly to challenge us. Everyday
architecture gives us some license to ignore it, to think of it as a kind of
background hum, to be noticed only when it is exceptionally big,
exceptionally ugly, or exceptionally beautiful. Most of the architecture that
surrounds us we barely see; in architecture, familiarity often breeds not
contempt but complacency.
The Savoyes and Edith Farnsworth would have been happy to settle for
complacency, I suspect. It is no wonder that they were not happy. Even
without leaky roofs and too much hot sun, it is difficult to live within a work
of art every day of your life. The Savoyes and Edith Farnsworth chose their
architects and approved their plans, of course, but that is beside the point; it
merely adds a level of irony to their distress. Owners of houses by Frank
Lloyd Wright speak of feeling Wright’s presence at every moment, and they
are not talking in spiritual or ghostly terms. They mean that every aspect of
their houses is so powerfully shaped by Wright’s aesthetic that they feel he is
directing their movements and their feelings as they try to go about their daily
lives. Most Wright owners are fiercely loyal to their houses, but it is not
surprising that they seek a break from time to time from his relentless
presence.
Architecture that has been designed to be a constant presence in our lives
can also raise expectations far too high; even if it does not create the anguish
felt by the Savoyes and Edith Farnsworth or force itself unceasingly on us
like Wright’s, it still seems to dangle before us a kind of ideal world, an
aesthetic perfection that can all too easily be taken to feel like a salve for
other wounds and a promise of perfection in other aspects of life. It is not, of
course, so. Perfect architecture does not make our lives perfect. “The noblest
architecture can sometimes do less for us than a siesta or an aspirin,” the
philosopher Alain de Botton wrote in The Architecture of Happiness. “Even
if we could spend the rest of our lives in the Villa Rotunda or the Glass
House, we would still often be in a bad mood.”

The paradox of challenge and comfort goes to the core of architecture as art.
If great art exists to challenge, and sometimes rejects the very possibility of
comfort, can architecture, which must take such matters into account, ever be
great art? Obviously it can be, and is. But art and comfort need not be a zero-
sum game, however much Philip Johnson may have pretended so in the
remark with which this chapter began. No one really lives in Chartres; no
one expects a profound aesthetic experience from a Harvard dormitory. Take
Johnson not literally but as a warning (he spoke these words in the early
1950s) against the mundane functionalism that dominated architectural
culture in the postwar years. There is more to architecture than efficiency—
there is art! Or so he was proclaiming.
It is worth pointing out here that of the buildings that disappoint, most do
so not because of failure to deliver on their aesthetic aspirations but because
their architects had given up on aesthetic aspirations altogether and thought
only in terms of efficiency, and generally failed to deliver even that. It isn’t
the leaky-roofed masterwork that is the problem, in other words, it is the
hospital that is a cold, forbidding environment to the patients who are there
ostensibly to feel better and to the staff who work there every day; or it is the
school that seems designed more for the ease of the custodial staff than for
the pleasure of the students and teachers; or it is the airport with endless
concourses that feel like overcrowded basements, laid out for the
convenience of moving airplanes, not for the pleasure of people; or it is the
strip mall that was designed solely to make it easier to drive cars in and out.
Practicality and function are complicated things, if not quite as daunting as
aesthetics, and when we talk about function, it is important to keep in mind
just whose practicality and what function a building is intended to serve.

“Form follows function,” that old chestnut of modern architecture, turns out,
once you dig into it, to mean very little at all. There are just too many kinds
of function, and too many ways different forms can serve the same function,
for that line to be of any help at all. And is not visual pleasure, which that
cliché willfully ignores, a kind of function, too?
 It should be obvious by now that I much prefer the term “comfort,” not
because I think comfort is the same as practicality but because it seems to
connect much more directly to the needs of people who actually use a
building. A hospital may appear to be functioning well if it is laid out for
efficient movement of patients to and from the operating room or the
emergency room, but it may not be comfortable at all for those patients, and
that is a far more important—we might even say a far more ethical—measure
of what constitutes function. This is the essence of the idea behind a
movement called “evidence-based design,” which seeks to shift the
architectural priorities in facilities such as hospitals to designs that have
clearly been shown in research studies to improve patient health, as the
design of a school should be driven by elements that make it pleasanter for
students and teachers. The notion that scientific research might determine
wise design directions is only beginning to take hold among both architects
and the medical profession, but it is growing. The key elements of evidence-
based design are simple and straightforward: greater connections to nature; a
greater sense of choice so that patients can have more control over their
environment; facilities to make it easy for spouses and others to be present to
provide social support for patients; pleasant visual and aural distractions for
patients; logical and comprehensible building layouts; and an avoidance of
unpleasant or harsh noise, glaring light, or smells. Evidence-based design is
intended not to devalue efficiency but to value serenity more.
The word “comfort” is also closer to contentment, and contentment is a
worthy thing for architecture to inspire. I think it is what Alain de Botton
(what is it about architecture that inspires philosophers to write books about
it?) meant by the title of his book The Architecture of Happiness, in which he
explored the connections between architecture, feeling, and human character,
cautioning against believing that architecture could change lives by itself but
celebrating its sway over our emotions nonetheless.
Comfort alone, or “contentment,” if that term feels more natural to you, is
enough some of the time, but not all of the time. What we need, more than
anything, is to understand the importance of synthesis, which is to say the
view that the unique thing about architecture is that it is within its rights to
seek aesthetic challenge and physical comfort at the same time. That doesn’t
quite mean that a building should be expected to be difficult and to inspire
contentment in equal measure—a near impossibility—but rather that these
two qualities, which so rarely occur together, should be considered entitled
to coexist. The synthesis required by architecture is far more subtle than that
required by any other form of art. Every building contains tangible elements
that respond to its practical aspects and intangible ones that respond to its
aesthetic ambitions. “A great building,” Kahn said, “must begin with the
unmeasurable, go through measurable means when it is being designed, and
in the end must be un-measurable.”
The answer to the architectural paradox is surely not to reject comfort
altogether, as some architects have done, as if to say that aesthetic value
comes in inverse proportion to the degree of contentment a building inspires.
I think in particular of those architects who in the 1980s and 1990s identified
with the Deconstructivist movement, proudly proclaiming the obligation of
architecture to create a sense of dislocation and unease, ostensibly with the
goal of reflecting the postmodern condition. (The work of architects such as
Peter Eisenman in New York, Eric Owen Moss in Los Angeles, and the firm
of Coop Himmelblau in Vienna, which depend heavily on colliding forms
and sharp angles, provide examples of this.) This is architecture attempting
to make an aesthetic statement that all but denies the responsibility of
architecture to house human beings and to provide them with at least a
modicum of comfort. This architecture of anxious angles and discordant
forms avoids comfort as an end in itself and actively creates discomfort. This
is not an architecture of synthesis but an architecture that comes from the idea
that challenge is all that matters and rejects the idea of comfort as
representing soft-headedness, even weakness. So, too, with buildings such as
Minoru Yamasaki’s Rainer Square skyscraper in Seattle, which is balanced
on a central concrete pier and looms ominously over the pedestrian, a simple
and glib form of challenge that yields not profound experience but annoyance.
Yet the aim of such architecture is at least higher than that which goes to
the other extreme and rejects challenge in favor of nothing but comfort: the
revivalists who make Georgian villas and Spanish Colonial mansions,
seeking an easy sentimentality. There has been a lot of architecture of this
kind made in the current generation—more, probably, than at any other time
since modernism began its rise into the mainstream in the 1920s. As I said in
the previous chapter, much of it is of high quality. It offers all the consolation
in the world, and given how much we need background buildings as well as
foreground buildings (a subject I will discuss more fully in chapter 7), there
is plenty of justification for it. But it abdicates the most serious ambitions of
art and prefers the view that if architecture can provide a peaceful backdrop
for a civilized life, it will have served its purpose.
Much of the time, perhaps even most of the time, that is true. The
sprawling neo–Shingle Style houses of architects such as Robert A. M. Stern
and Jaquelin Robertson, to name but two examples, are gracious and
intelligently wrought homages to some of the greatest American architecture
of all time. The models cannot be faulted, and neither can the execution. Such
houses are easy to live in and beautiful to look at, and there is no question
that they, like the best of the neo-Georgian, Spanish Colonial, and
Neoclassical architecture produced today, achieve much of what architecture
aspires to. They surely bring contentment, and often even joy. But if we
desire masterpieces as well as civilized, comforting spaces, we must go
beyond buildings like these, welcoming presences though they may be. They
offer us not the difficult moments in which art moves forward but the easy
moments in which art congratulates itself on what it has done. The
Neoclassical house produced today is, to paraphrase Jeanette Winterson,
Constable today, not Constable when new.
It is not the obligation of every building to push the art of architecture
forward—and thank goodness for that, since it would make our cities
cacophonies of ego—but it is essential to keep in mind that there is a
difference between excellence that looks backward and excellence that
strives to leap ahead and change the way people see the world. A sumptuous
Georgian mansion on Long Island designed by Delano and Aldrich in the
1930s offers vast pleasures, and its qualities remain potent today—but it is
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater that changed the world, and it is important
not to forget the difference. Although the person who rejects the Georgian
mansion as a stuffy remnant of a bygone era denies him or herself the
opportunity to experience exquisitely wrought form, detail, and proportion,
the person who considers Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao just a
chaotic assemblage of industrial elements has denied him- or herself
something more profound, losing the chance to experience one of the late
twentieth century’s greatest and most thrilling works of art. Let architects
reject one path or the other; connoisseurs of architecture must understand
both the building that elevates comfort over challenge and the building that
elevates challenge over comfort.
Can the two priorities of architecture as art—challenge and comfort—be
merged? Or, more to the point, can the two be merged without weakening
both? We have already seen, in the Yamasaki skyscraper, how simpleminded
challenge makes only for discomfort. Meeting halfway—through architecture
that challenges a little and comforts a little but doesn’t do quite enough of
either—is a typical compromise, and the built world is full of them: look, for
example, at so much late-twentieth-century corporate architecture, such as
Kohn Pedersen Fox’s sprawling, angular headquarters for the IBM
Corporation in Armonk, New York, or that firm’s super-tall skyscraper in
Shanghai with a hole as its crown, which attempts to blend a sculptural
statement with functional needs. But at its best, the synthesis architecture
strives for is more profound than this and carries both challenge and comfort
to a higher level.
Perhaps challenge is not the best term: perhaps intensity of feeling is.
That, surely, is the reason that the Gothic buildings at Yale by James Gamble
Rogers are so successful, despite their somewhat soft intellectual
underpinnings. They are not only stunningly beautiful, they connect with a
laserlike directness to an institution’s sense of itself, and if that sense is
lacking in the ironic edge that we have come to expect of architecture at the
end of the twentieth century, no matter. In structures like Rogers’s Harkness
Tower, the climactic element of his Memorial Quadrangle (now Branford
and Saybrook Colleges), or his Berkeley and Trumbull and Jonathan
Edwards Colleges, innocence rises to a kind of heroic grandeur, and it has a
very different quality from the self-indulgence that characterizes so much
other purely historicist architecture. The historical replication in these Yale
buildings isn’t like that of the pseudo-Mediterranean villas put up by real
estate developers; these are truly heroic statements. Like the Woolworth
Building or Grand Central Terminal or the New York Public Library, the
Yale buildings bespeak a potent civic presence, not to mention a visual
magnificence, that transcends the absence of what we have called challenge.
And these buildings (which I use here to stand for many other great works
that rely on the architecture of the past) are also deeply ethical, to return
again to that aspect of the architectural equation. In many ways, it is what
Karsten Harries has called the ethical function that brings challenge and
comfort together: the building whose high aesthetic ambitions exist also to
fulfill a social purpose. When a building succeeds at its high aesthetic
ambitions and possesses a meaningful and convincing social purpose, it
works on a level that relatively few structures do. And in its ethical function,
it challenges us even if its architects may have intended mainly to comfort us.
 The greatest architecture inspires awe. It stuns us, and it stops us in our
tracks. It leaves us speechless. In the making of special, intense, poetically
crafted space—“ineffable space,” as Le Corbusier called it, for great
architectural space, like great music and poetry, can never be described
adequately—is where the architect’s highest aesthetic achievement comes.
Space (which is discussed more fully in chapter 4) is architecture’s aesthetic
reality, at least as much as the walls and floors and the details and ornaments
that surround it.
If the most exquisitely made space is capable of evoking feelings of awe,
this is not to diminish the importance of the mass and shape of a building’s
exterior. Great works are always compositions, combinations of solids and
voids and horizontals and verticals put together as we had never imagined
possible, to make the same stunning response as the space itself. Not for
nothing did Vitruvius select the word “delight” as the third portion of his
tripartite definition of architecture; great architecture must evoke
indescribable joy.
 James Gamble Rogers, Harkness Tower, Yale University, New Haven

Joy and challenge? How can these two things go together? How can there
be joy in great architecture if its mission is to challenge, to upset the order of
the universe as we know it? It would seem as if joy should go with
complacency, not with challenge; by logic the joy ought to belong to the
hesitant, unchallenging, but thoroughly comfortable neo-Georgian mansion,
not to the daring object that resembles nothing we have ever seen before. Yet
this is the magic of architecture’s synthesis: when it works right, as in the
masterworks of every age including our own, it startles us and comforts us at
the same time. There is something serene about most great architecture, even
as it surprises us. Even the deliberate distortions of classical form by the
Italian Mannerists, from Michelangelo to Giulio Romano; the extraordinary
classical virtuosity of Nicholas Hawksmoor or Sir John Soane or Sir Edwin
Lutyens; the laser-like intensity of Le Corbusier; the aloof coolness of Mies
van der Rohe; the passionate, almost mystical forms of Louis Kahn; the
contemporary mannerism of Robert Venturi; the seemingly disordered forms
of Frank Gehry—all of these can shock, and often do, particularly those who
see them for the first time. Yet in other ways they are deeply reassuring, for
they create space and form that communicate their essence to us powerfully,
and warmly. They seek to delight the eye in new ways but do not reject the
notion of delight any more than they reject the other aspects of the Vitruvian
equation. They interpret delight as emotional intensity, which is something
that great architecture has always been able to inspire. A great building must
have a use, it must stand up—and it must be a work of art.
3
architecture as object
Architecture is the play of forms—wise, correct, magnificent
—the play of forms in the light.
LE CORBUSIER

The sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a
building.
LOUIS KAHN

Architecture is physical form. However much we consider its cultural

meanings, its symbolism, its social value, or how the computer-driven world
of cyberspace is creating new concepts of virtual space, the reality of
architecture remains: buildings, not concepts, and how buildings combine to
make places that are larger than their parts. Architecture is built form in the
physical world and must be understood, experienced, and judged by the
standards of built form in the physical world. The traditional principles still
apply: architecture depends for its effectiveness on the extent to which the
portions of a structure relate to one another and to the whole, and also how
they relate to the human form. Every building connects to the way the eye
perceives both space and composition. Whatever else may contribute to the
way we experience it—the way it relates to memory, the extent to which it
functions smoothly or not, the degree of physical comfort it offers—our
relationship to a building almost always begins with the way it looks.
This remains true despite the overwhelming effect that the computer, the
enabler of the virtual world, has had on the process of design and
construction. Even though all kinds of buildings, from Frank Gehry’s
extraordinary sculptural shapes like the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the
Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles to the latest generation of super-tall
skyscrapers like the Burj Dubai, could not have been built without the aid of
computer-driven technologies, and digital technology now makes it possible
to create more effective representation of real space than ever before, the
basic truth does not change: architecture is buildings, and buildings have a
physical reality. They have tops, bottoms, and sides. They have facades, or
fronts, which are both visual compositions and public faces. They have
interiors, which are both to be used as rooms and felt as three-dimensional
space. They have overall form and shape, which can be seen from afar and
from up close, and which may appear altogether different depending on your
vantage point. The physical reality of buildings, both great and ordinary,
obliges us to think of them, first and foremost, as objects.
In Round Buildings, Square Buildings, and Buildings That Wiggle Like a
Fish, by Philip M. Isaacson, a lyrical paean to the joy of architecture written
for children, there are chapters titled “Thick Walls and Thin Walls,” “Light
and Color,” “Old Bones and New Bones” (about frameworks), and “Indoor
Skies” (about ceilings). There are no chapters about how buildings function
or why they are built or how they get constructed, not because Isaacson thinks
that these things don’t matter but because he knows that they are not the best
way in, so to speak. Similarly, in his excellent but rather more turgid book
Experiencing Architecture, Steen Eiler Rasmussen has given chapters names
like “Solids and Cavities in Architecture,” “Rhythm and Architecture,”
“Scale and Proportion,” and “Architecture Experienced as Color Planes”—
less lilting phrases, but the point is the same. You cannot love architecture
without caring about how buildings look, and taking pleasure in that. If you
do not respond to the physical appearance of buildings—if, say, when you
are looking at a white clapboard church on a New England green, you can’t
come to sense the exuberance of the way its steeple meets the sky, or the
welcoming grandeur of its front door, or the crisp, flat feeling of its walls—
then you will never understand architecture, no matter how much you know
about the reasons buildings come to be or the process of constructing them.
Of course the physical reality of buildings is only a part of the story.
Buildings are public presences, and even as we evaluate them as physical
form, it is vital to remember that every building also has a social and
political, as well as a financial, reality and that we ignore these other
dimensions of architecture at our peril. Indeed, proper respect for at least the
social and political sphere is essential to understanding architecture. Who
could judge a work of public housing purely as an aesthetic object, apart
from the lives of the people within it? Or a hospital separate from the degree
to which it facilitates caring for the sick? Or a military compound without
any thought to the purposes for which was made?
None of these things are objects alone. They are structures that make
social statements within a sociopolitical realm. They are statements of
society’s values. So, too, with a concert hall or a library or a museum or a
shopping mall, each of which represents a commitment of resources, and our
view of that commitment must affect our opinion of the building that it brings
forth. Would we think of Albert Speer’s vision for Berlin differently had it
not been designed for the Nazi regime? (I suspect not, since the overbearing
grandiosity and banality that makes it so difficult for us to accept Speer
aesthetically is precisely what attracted his Nazi clients to his work.)
Perhaps more to the point, do we allow our view of anyone who builds—
whether it is a museum board risking its financial security on a daring new
structure by a young architect or a school district insisting that it wants to
build only plain-vanilla architecture or a hedge-fund manager showing off his
wherewithal by erecting a pretentious mock-French château—to color our
aesthetic judgment? It is impossible not to, at least to some extent. But yet
another of the challenges of understanding architecture is to know when it is
appropriate to allow social issues to play a major role in judgment and when
it makes more sense to keep them in the background. If we were to reject all
architecture produced by and for countries with whose policies we do not
agree—or even by and for people with whom we do not agree—we would
be rendering the whole notion of architectural judgment ridiculous by making
aesthetics altogether irrelevant. Yet we cannot pretend that any building
exists in an aesthetic vacuum, apart from any other concerns.
For the next few pages, though, I ask you to put aside these other concerns
and think only in terms of what a building looks like when you stand before
it. This task is difficult enough, given that there really is no single way of
analyzing buildings or even a common set of criteria by which to judge their
aesthetics. Even within the realm of visual perception, there is no clear set of
priorities. What do you look at first? Does a building’s facade matter the
most in determining whether it is an aesthetic success? Or is it a question of
how all its sides come together to create a coherent object? Or is neither of
these things as important as the nature and quality of the space within? And if
it is the facade that you look at first, is it a matter of how well crafted it is as
an artistic composition? Or do you wonder how appropriate and how
physically appealing the materials are? What if the composition feels right
but the colors seem wrong? Or if the color is right but the ornament and
decoration feel off? Is the facade too busy, too spare, too fussy, or too
austere? If it is a building that has been designed in some traditional style, is
it to be judged by its degree of faithfulness to that style? And if it has been
designed to be new and different, is it to be judged by the extent to which it is
unlike anything else you have seen before?
Complex questions all, and none of them can be taken entirely on its own.
They connect to one another, and perhaps the most important thing to say at
this point is that some things matter more in certain situations and other things
matter more in others. We are lucky that there is no way to rank buildings on
some sort of absolute aesthetic scale—or perhaps it is better to say that it is
just as well that attempts to quantify aesthetics have always failed, first
because they ignore the fact that art, at its best, involves an instinctive sense
that a kind of magic is being performed, a magic that, by its very nature, we
cannot deconstruct and reconstruct as a formula to be used by others; and
second, more specific to architecture than other arts, because turning
aesthetics into numbers does not take into account the myriad of
circumstances that form the context for the understanding of any building.
And by context I mean not only the physical context—whether it is an urban
building on a narrow street, a tower beside a freeway, a building in rolling
farmland or in deep forest or on a suburban cul-de-sac—but also the
temporal context, the time in which it was built, and often enough the
political context, too, within which the architect has had to operate. And then,
as I said above, there are the intentions of the designers and builders, and the
building’s uses, and so forth. Every one of these things can have some impact
on aesthetics. But how we determine how much each of them matters, if it
matters at all, is itself part of the challenge.
And then, when you have fully digested the object, so to speak, there is the
question of how it connects to other buildings—how well the object relates
to the other objects around it. In the end, architecture is an art of specifics,
not of generalities, which is why it is more fruitful by far to try to grasp some
of these ideas not by looking for formulas but by talking about the look and
feel of actual buildings.
Let me begin by saying something about an American monument almost
everyone knows, the Lincoln Memorial, and how it relates to the great Greek
temple on which it was loosely based, the Parthenon: a pair of buildings that
represent a similar aesthetic but which are notably, even overwhelmingly,
different. The Lincoln Memorial, that marble box wrapped in thirty-six
columns that sits at the end of the Mall in Washington, is obviously a Greek
temple in one sense, and in another it is not a Greek temple at all. The
architect Henry Bacon created a masterwork that in many ways is as
inventive and original as the modernist buildings created in Europe at the
same time—1915–22—as the memorial was designed.
Bacon used the vocabulary of Greek architecture (actually, Greco-Roman
architecture, since it possesses the shared characteristics of both of these
classical styles), but he used it brilliantly to his own purpose, which was to
create an immense, formal box to memorialize Abraham Lincoln and stand as
a symbol of American certitude and conviction. The memorial closes off the
vista that begins with the United States Capitol two miles to the east, and it
sits at the end of a reflecting pool, from a distance appearing, like the Taj
Mahal, almost to float on the water. This is one of the great scenographic
buildings of all time, and if it is not sensual enough by day, look at it at night,
when the soft lighting makes the marble box glow behind the Doric columns,
which appear dark behind the white marble, jumping out visually like the
image in a photographic negative.
Bacon started with the Parthenon, yet he all but turned it inside out. The
Lincoln Memorial is not a structure supported by columns, like a Greek
temple, but more of a marble box surrounded by a colonnade. The walls are
set inside, behind the columns, and they shoot straight up beyond them. The
effect—again, slightly more dramatic with night lighting—is of a classical
coating applied to a brooding, almost primal geometric form. There is no
attempt, then, to mimic the appearance of a real Greek temple; it is hard not
to think that Bacon’s real interest was to communicate the power of abstract
form and the strength of silence.

Henry Bacon, Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.

 Steen Eiler Rasmussen has written that architectural perception is
intimately connected with feels of hardness and softness, heaviness and
lightness, solid and void, a kind of visual dialectic or rhythm. The Lincoln
Memorial demonstrates all of this clearly: the hardness of the sharply defined
form plays off against the (relative) softness of Daniel Chester French’s
statue of a seated Lincoln; we could say that the heaviness of the boxy
structure is lightened by the columns, and the columns and the space behind
them surely represent the dialectic between solid and void. Rasmussen
believed that these visual rhythms are universal, however differently they
might be expressed in different kinds of buildings. “Most buildings consist of
a combination of hard and soft, taut and slack, and of many kinds of
surfaces,” he wrote in Experiencing Architecture. “These are all elements of
architecture, some of the things the architect can call into play. And to
experience architecture, you must be aware of all of these elements.”
But there is more to say about the Lincoln Memorial that goes beyond
Rasmussen’s criteria. To better balance the Capitol at the other end of the
Mall, Bacon rotated his temple so that the long side served as the main
facade and entrance, not the short end as at the Parthenon. He also eliminated
the gabled attic present in real Greek temples (“attic” means Greek top),
replacing it with a flat roof, rendering the building all the more abstract. If
the Lincoln Memorial does nothing else, it can stand as a reminder that the
mere presence of elements from classical architecture does not mean much
when analyzing a building. The vocabulary of historical style can be used
much more creatively than pure replication. In this case Bacon combined
urbanistic concerns with scenographic ones to yield a building of startling
grandeur and self-assurance.
Still, to most people the Lincoln Memorial is remembered as a bigger,
grander, and more pompous Parthenon. Is this vast, white, hard marble
building too cold, too austere, to stand as a proper memorial to Lincoln, a
man of few pretensions? It is hard to disagree with Lewis Mumford, who
asked, “Who lives in that shrine—Lincoln, or the men who conceived it?”
But the men who conceived it did understand how to make architecture
majestic, and that is their greatest triumph and ultimately the noblest tribute to
Lincoln that can be imagined. Henry Bacon saw how to make Greek
architecture an American cathedral.
Most writers who have tried to analyze the experience of looking at
buildings have, like Rasmussen, dealt primarily with visual perception and
said relatively little about symbolism, and often surprisingly little about
style. William Caudill, William Peña, and Paul Kennon in Architecture and
You suggest three ways of perceiving shapes: as plastic, or shaped and
molded; as planar, or made up mainly of intersecting planes or surfaces; and
as skeletal, or seen primarily as a frame, with a sense that space moves
through it. Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport in
New York is a prime example of a plastic building, as is a Frank Gehry
building like the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Mies van der
Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion of 1929 surely illustrates the second type, and Le
Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, in Marseilles, of 1953, with its powerful
concrete grid, is a well-known work of the third type. This distinction is
useful, so far as it goes, but like all formulas it prefers neatness of
categorization to reality, and ignores the fact that most architecture does not
fit precisely into these types of form—while many buildings combine all
three.
These categories will mean little if you are trying to understand your
house, and they are of scant help, say, in analyzing skyscrapers. Rasmussen’s
observations, while hard to argue with, don’t take us too far with tall
buildings, either. If you look at three of the most important postwar American
skyscrapers—Mies van der Rohe’s great Seagram Building on Park Avenue
in New York, Edward Durell Stone’s General Motors Building on Fifth
Avenue in New York, and I. M. Pei and Henry Cobb’s John Hancock Tower
on Copley Square in Boston—you can see that other ways of looking are
needed. Too many other factors come into play. The darkly elegant Seagram
Building presents a reserved, symmetrical rectangle to the street, and it rises
behind an expansive, open plaza. To approach it across the plaza creates a
sense of occasion; you feel almost compelled to walk in a straight line
toward the entrance rather than to amble casually across it. The much taller,
glaringly white General Motors Building is also symmetrical and set back
from the street, but for years it made a ceremonial, stately approach like the
one to the Seagram Building impossible, since the G.M. Building had a
sunken plaza, and to reach the front door you had to walk around what
amounted to a huge hole, a full level deep, at the edge of Fifth Avenue. (Now
the plaza has been filled in and turned into a below-ground Apple Computer
store, its entry an exquisite and enticing glass box that makes a splendid focal
point for a vastly improved plaza that is where plazas ought to be, at street
level.) As for the Hancock Tower, there is barely an entrance at all. This
tower has an unusual shape, a slab sliced on the diagonal so that from some
angles it appears like a thin wafer and from others, almost like a flat surface
with nothing behind it at all. It is like a piece of abstract sculpture, beautiful
but mute, and any door would appear to violate its perfection. No wonder the
architects decided to tuck a discreet door onto the ground floor; they wanted
us to barely notice it. The idea here is to minimize procession and to think of
the building as an elegant, sculptural object set within the complex
composition of Copley Square.

Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, Seagram Building, New York

The surface structure of the Seagram Building is made of bronze, giving it

a deep brown hue. In between the windows, metal beams, called I-beams,
rise all the way up the facade, a kind of modernist form of decoration. They
give the facade depth and texture, just as traditional moldings do, and they
create a rhythm for the eye. The General Motors Building is sheathed in
white marble, and it, too, has vertical lines running all the way up, but
instead of the delicate and understated texture of Mies’s I-beams, these
vertical lines are thick white stripes. The windows, instead of being flat, are
all three-part bay windows, so the facade has a kind of rhythm, but it is more
of an undulation. The Hancock Tower is light in color like the General
Motors Building, but in every other way it could not be more different: it is
sheathed in reflective glass, and the surface of its facade is absolutely flat; it
appears to have no depth. There is deliberately no texture to it, and no
ornament; only the shape itself, and the grid pattern of the flat, reflective
windows, engage the eye.
Those windows began to fall out when the building was nearly finished,
in the mid-1970s; after extended litigation they were replaced by similar-
looking panels of different construction, but for an extended period the
building was sheathed not in glass but in plywood and was known less as a
major work of architecture than as the site of one of the most embarrassing
construction errors of all time.
Once the new glass was put in, you could finally see that Hancock was
designed to look as if it had been conceived as a pure abstraction, a cool,
elegant piece of modern sculpture. It appears almost weightless, despite its
size. Seagram, by contrast, seems to have the weight, the bearing, and the
formality of a traditional building. It may have been designed by one of the
twentieth century’s great masters of modern architecture, but it seems intent
on respecting architectural conventions, not overturning them. The
proportions of its windows are elegant, and you sense that behind each pane
is life and activity—indeed, you can often see it. At the General Motors
Building, Edward Durell Stone seems to have tried even harder than Mies
van der Rohe to respect architectural conventions, but he has done it with a
much heavier hand. The bay window, a staple of small houses, seems oddly
out of place when it is replicated by the hundreds, and the rhythms and
textures of this facade are clunky more than graceful. As for the Hancock
building, Pei and Cobb’s very point was to push the envelope of architectural
convention. Hancock’s panes of glass look like panels, not actual windows,
and because they are all mirrors, you can see nothing behind them. But you
can see neighboring buildings like Henry Hobson Richardson’s great Trinity
Church reflected in them, not to mention the blue or the gray of the Boston
skies.
When you look at the Seagram Building or the General Motors Building or
the Hancock Tower, you see not only an object but also a certain vision of the
world. Architecture, among other things, seeks to establish order. Mies’s
order is easy to see—subtle and understated, but powerful and self-assured.
The Seagram Building is far from small, but its scale is not overwhelming;
indeed, the building seems to have been designed with a sense of human size
always in mind. Its design appears simple at first glance, but the
extraordinary precision of its detail and the serenity of its proportions are
anything but casual. If the Seagram Building has a Zen simplicity to it, the
General Motors Building suggests a more garish view of the world, one in
which a few eye-grabbing gestures, like the white marble and the bay
windows, are expected to create an aesthetic experience and to hide the fact
that the building is, at the end of the day, a dressed-up box. Mies does not try
to hide the fact that he has designed a box, and instead helps us find a tranquil
and deep beauty in it; Stone seems to believe that there can be no true beauty
in such simplicity and wants to fancy everything up.

Edward Durell Stone, General Motors Building, New York

The vision Pei and Cobb suggest with the Hancock Tower is a more
difficult and complex one—full of movement and lines of tension. They did
not want to compete head-on with Mies van der Rohe in the category of
boxlike high-rises, and they chose to make their skyscraper in another shape
altogether, a shape that in its very sleekness suggests that it is pushing the art
of skyscraper design forward. (The Seagram Building went up in the late
1950s, the General Motors Building in the 1960s, and the Hancock Tower in
the 1970s, and while neither of the later two buildings was designed in direct
response to its predecessor, it is hard not to think that their architects wanted
to do something different from what had come before.) The General Motors
Building has little to do with its surroundings, an indifference that its
original, little-mourned sunken plaza made far worse than it is today, while
the Seagram Building, despite being a structure of glass on a street that, at
least in the 1950s, was made entirely of masonry buildings, was carefully
aligned on a symmetrical axis opposite its classical neighbor, the Racquet
and Tennis Club by McKim, Mead and White across Park Avenue. When you
stand in front of the Seagram Building, you can feel an imaginary line that
runs right through the center of its facade, across the plaza, across the street,
and then right into the center of the Racquet Club. As for the Hancock Tower,
paradoxically, even though its reflective glass would appear to signify the
ultimate diffidence and aloofness—you can’t see in, and there is no sign of
human activity from the outside—the reflected images of surrounding
buildings, not to mention the general sense of energy of its crisp shape, make
you feel a connection between the tower and its urban surroundings. This
building feels right for its place, almost in spite of itself.

I. M. Pei and Partners, John Hancock Tower, Boston

“Form is a mystery which eludes definition but which makes man feel good
in a way quite unlike social aid,” Alvar Aalto, the great Finnish architect,
said in a lecture in 1955. He was right. But while we will never fully
understand why form—by which Aalto meant anything having to do with the
way we perceive the physical presence of a building, be it the facade, the
overall shape, the ornament, or the spaces within—can instill an emotional
response, we cannot leave it at that. We can admit that there is no complete
answer, but there are partial answers to why your eye takes pleasure in some
forms and displeasure in others.
Stanley Abercrombie, in Architecture as Art, an introduction to
architecture from the standpoint of aesthetic analysis, argues that shapes—
basic geometric shapes—have a wholeness and a completeness that is
inherently compelling. “Shapes arrest our attention, invite our curiosity, thrill
us or repel us in the greatest possible variety of ways,” Abercrombie writes.
“Some, because they come laden with specific messages, affect us in ways
that are easily understood, others in ways difficult to explain. With or without
explanation, the power of shapes is indisputable.”

Exterior view, Pantheon, Rome

Surely this is one of the reasons that the Pantheon in Rome is such an
extraordinary building: a cylinder topped by a low dome with a Corinthian
portico in front, it is actually a combination of simple shapes, but the
cylinder is what holds your attention, even with the immense colonnade of
the portico. The Pantheon is a composition of circles: the interior space is
circular, the interior of the dome is a half-sphere, the open oculus at the top
of the dome is another circle, and of course the columns, although they
support a rectangular portico, are circles as well. The proportions of the
Pantheon enhance the sense of pure and simple geometry: the diameter of the
circle is 142 feet, and the height to the top of the dome is exactly the same. If
the half-sphere of the dome were given a bottom half to create a complete
sphere, it would fit perfectly inside the building; by the same token, the entire
building could fit perfectly into an imaginary cube.
Pyramids, whether the vast, great Pyramids of Egypt or I. M. Pei’s glass
pyramid at the Louvre in Paris, or even a tiny pyramidal paperweight, exude
a sense of strength. Nothing, after all, can knock over a pyramid. If nothing
else, it is stable. But it is also easy to identify and easy to understand. There
is no mystery to a pyramid, at least as a pure geometric form. But for almost
everyone the pyramid has the added advantage of a deep well of
associations. A pyramid is Egypt, if you want it to be, and even if you do not
share the ancient Egyptians’ belief that the gilt-covered point at the top could
make manifest the sun god Ra as it reflected the morning sun, you cannot fail
to feel that all pyramids somehow connect you to ancient civilization.
I. M. Pei quite ingeniously took advantage of these associations when he
designed the glass pyramid that was constructed in 1989 to serve as a new
entrance, and effectively a new symbol, for the Louvre in Paris. A structure
of glass and steel in the middle of the courtyard of the Louvre seemed, at
first, like the least appropriate thing imaginable. It was not only introducing
modernity to a sixteenth-century space, it was bringing a quality of sleekness
and an aesthetic that we might associate more with industrial design than
with a former royal palace in France. But Pei defended his design on the
basis of the ancient lineage of the pyramid. It was, he argued, not a modern
shape at all but one of the oldest and most basic shapes in architecture; he
was only building it out of modern materials. Pei turned out to be right. The
glass pyramid and the old wings of the Louvre that surround it coexist with a
remarkable degree of ease. The pyramid creates an elegant punctuation mark
in the middle of the courtyard; the rest of the Louvre provides a perfect
backdrop for the light, airy presence of the pyramid.
 I. M. Pei, glass pyramid, Louvre Museum, Paris

Not the least of the reasons the Louvre pyramid turned out to be successful
is that, to return to Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s ways of looking at things, it
represents lightness amid heaviness, and transparency amid solidity. The
pyramid works well also because of its size, which is big enough to hold its
own in the large courtyard and serve as a fitting entrance to the vast museum,
yet small enough not to overpower the older buildings. And the precision of
Pei’s detailing helps as well, by making clear that the pyramid, for all its
stylistic difference from the rest of the Louvre, represents continuity in the
sense that it, too, is an exquisitely wrought, one-of-a-kind object, the farthest
thing in the world from a mass-produced, contemporary commercial
building.

Veldon Simpson, Luxor Hotel, Las Vegas

 You could not say that about the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, designed by
Veldon Simpson, which also has a glass pyramid, executed with none of
Pei’s finesse. The Luxor pyramid, which encloses a set of fairly conventional
hotel rooms around an open atrium, is sheathed in a nondescript, brown-
tinted reflective glass, making the building indistinguishable from a
commercial office building but for its shape. The space in the center of the
Luxor is awkwardly laid out; the clarity that the pyramid promises from
outside is not delivered within. The fact is that pyramids are not particularly
practical forms for most building functions, which is why there are few of
them around that are not monuments of some kind. Pei’s pyramid at the
Louvre is only an entry pavilion leading to an underground lobby, and so it
had few real functions. It could be open and transparent, a pure, abstract
shape in glass like the Apple cube in front of the General Motors Building,
also an entry pavilion. But at the Luxor in Las Vegas, the notion of the design
was to create a casino hotel with an Egyptian theme, and the architects had to
accommodate all kinds of conventional functions, many of which they
couldn’t fit at all and had to relegate to adjacent, boxy wings. The pyramid
was used as an iconic symbol and as a container for a portion of the hotel’s
rooms and public spaces, but the constraints of its shape were such that it
would have been impossible to put the entire hotel and casino into it unless it
were to be built at a size so gargantuan as to make no sense, since most of the
space in the middle would have gone to waste.
Simple shapes can be a Procrustean bed for architecture. So it was at the
Luxor, and it was also the case at the Hirshhorn Museum on the Mall in
Washington, designed by Gordon Bun-shaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill
and completed in 1974. Bunshaft clearly wanted a museum that didn’t look
like other museums, or much like anything else, for that matter, and he came
up with a cylindrical building with a round court in the middle, a shape that
relates in no clear way either to its function as a museum or to the forms and
shapes of the buildings around it. It is little more than a concrete donut, a
round bunker that signifies nothing about art and nothing about the civic role
that any public museum must play. The donut form yields internal galleries
that are round, but they have none of the spatial pleasures of Wright’s
Guggenheim in New York; these are merely confusing and awkward. The
Hirshhorn is a geometric form disconnected from its function and from its
surroundings, a chunky flying saucer on the Mall. Here, an architect seems to
have abandoned convention in favor of what can only be called an obsession
with geometries, a determination to play with abstract shapes to the exclusion
of common sense. If the Hirshhorn were beautiful we might forgive its
arrogance and indifference to both tradition and function—breathtaking
beauty can allow you to get away with a lot in architecture, as in life. But
after more than a generation, which is generally long enough for the cycles of
taste to come around, this form looks as heavy and graceless as it did when it
was brand-new.

Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

The Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York, designed by the Polshek Partnership and completed in
2000, uses an even more basic shape, a sphere, to somewhat better
advantage, but not without major practical compromises as well. Do they
matter? Less, I think, because Polshek’s sphere, unlike Bunshaft’s donut,
seems serene and less forced. The center contains the museum’s planetarium,
which Polshek placed in an immense sphere, which itself is set within a four-
story-high glass box. The sphere was inspired by one of the most famous
unbuilt designs in the history of architecture, Étienne-Louis Boullée’s
proposal in 1784 for a spherical monument to Isaac Newton that would have
been punctured by tiny holes to create the illusion of stars—in effect, an early
planetarium. Spheres, like pyramids, have a powerful visual impact, but they
do not lend themselves easily to some of the more conventional demands of
architecture. How do you support it? And where do you put the door?
Boullée set his sphere into a huge base and cut a tiny arch in the bottom;
Polshek anchored his on gigantic legs, giving it something of the appearance
of a vast piece of machinery, not quite consistent with the image of pure and
perfect geometrical form. He put a door in the in the middle, along the
equator, so to speak, with bridges connecting it to side balconies containing
stairs and elevators. The most elegant solution to the impossible problem of
putting a door in a sphere is the one used by Wallace K. Harrison for the
Perisphere, the spherical symbol of the 1939 New York World’s Fair: an
escalator climbing up to an entry door in the middle, and then a swirling exit
ramp that circled down the side of the sphere.

Polshek Partnership, Rose Center, American Museum of Natural History,

New York

If a sphere inside a glass box doesn’t make for the easiest or most logical
entrance, it makes up for the awkwardness of moving into, around, and
through it by its sheer presence. The Rose Center is the kind of building that
leads you to be forgiving of functional compromises, since the beauty of that
huge sphere surrounded by its glass enclosure, sitting within a park-like
setting on the north side of the museum, is like nothing else in New York, or
anywhere: an abstraction turned into a scientific exhibition, making real
Boullée’s eighteenth-century fantasy with twenty-first-century technology. At
night it is bathed in a soft, blue light, and it takes on an ethereal quality that
makes it seem even less like a conventional building, and more alluring still.
 The fewer functional demands, the more likely it is that a piece of
architecture that is based on a simple geometric shape will work. Robert
Mills’s design for the Washington Monument, a 555-foot-tall obelisk, is the
perfect example: it has no function at all, except to be there, the one structure
in the District of Columbia that is permitted to rise higher than the dome of
the Capitol. Yes, you can go up to the top of the monument and look out a tiny
window, but that is quite beside the point, which is really just to look at it
from afar, to feel its clarity and simplicity and directness and, if you wish, to
let those characteristics of the obelisk remind you of similar traits in George
Washington. The monument invokes both Washington’s singularity and a
sense of connection to ancient times and, by implication, to all of history. We
are lucky, by the way, that Mills’s original plan to surround the base of the
obelisk with a classical colonnade was never realized—it would only have
compromised the strength and directness of the monument as it now exists, a
truly pure shape.
Pure geometric shapes had a particular attraction for modern architects in
the early decades of the twentieth century, as they struggled to break free of
what, to them, was the fussy and deadening clutter of nineteenth-century
architecture. Thus Le Corbusier celebrated the factories and the grain
elevators of the American Midwest, which he found far more appealing than
almost anything else being erected in the United States. To architects who
were trying to express “honesty” in construction—and let us leave aside for
the moment the question of just what honesty actually is in architecture, or if
there even is such a thing—a grain elevator in particular seemed like a
perfect marriage of form and function. It had no excess, no frilly decorations,
nothing contorted for formal effect: just high, big, round cylinders, joined
together to create a form that, whatever its mundane purpose, seemed to have
a monumental presence. Le Corbusier called American grain elevators “the
magnificent first fruits of the new age.”
A reminder that the allure of simple, or relatively simple, geometric
shapes has not disappeared: the 30 St. Mary Axe tower in London by
Norman Foster, popularly known as “the gherkin,” and the nearly-as-pickle-
shaped Agbar Tower in Barcelona by Jean Nouvel, both skyscrapers of the
twenty-first century. Foster’s tower widens slightly as it rises, then tapers
toward its rounded top; Nouvel’s starts out as an ellipse in plan, with its
walls straight up and down, then tapers toward a similarly rounded top. The
phallic aspect of skyscrapers is an old story, but whatever else can be said
about the shape of these buildings, they may be remembered best for how
they have given that familiar metaphor a new lease on life, offset somewhat,
perhaps, by the fact that both buildings are sheathed entirely in that least
anthropomorphic of materials, glass. Foster’s glass is set in a spiral pattern
that seems intended to emphasize the tower’s geometry. The Nouvel
building’s glass skin is more high-tech—it has a complex layer of casements
that adjust to create a constantly changing pattern intended to resemble fluid:
the simple geometric shape turned into expressionist statement. When you
look at the Agbar Tower at night, the visual impact of its extraordinary skin
is so striking that you almost forget its shape. (It’s a reminder also that at
night, lighting can turn any three-dimensional building shape into a very
different kind of two-dimensional sign—something you can see in Texas
skyscrapers outlined in neon or in Asian towers whose facades contain
millions of tiny light-emitting diodes and act as gigantic television screens,
perhaps the ultimate way of making a building’s real shape seem, at least for
a moment, irrelevant.)
Both the Foster tower in London and the Nouvel tower in Barcelona
contain office space, so in neither building does the striking shape determine
the nature of the interior, the way it does, say, at the Pantheon, or in I. M.
Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre, where the interior is mainly a hollowed-out
version of the exterior shape. Instead, the insides of these towers consist of
relatively conventional offices, many of which have curved or slanted walls
—a case of complex functions fitted into a larger package. That’s what
architects do all the time, of course. Almost every building is to some extent
a Rubik’s Cube of structure and different kinds of interior spaces, all fitted
into some kind of larger shape. Then again, the structure that has the most
striking and compelling shape of any tall building in the twenty-first century,
the CCTV tower in Beijing—less a tower than a square version of a donut,
upended, with its top pulled out into a startling cantilevered corner—is, if
you listen to its architects, Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren of the Office for
Metropolitan Architecture, just the natural result of the logical organization
of its functions. The architects put the large, horizontal production studios on
the ground, other shared facilities in the horizontal sections that bridge across
the top, and various administrative offices that support production into the
vertical sections where they can connect to both the top and the bottom. The
building is vast—though it rises to only fifty-one stories, it has more floor
space than any other office building in Asia—and while its shape may indeed
allow the functional connections the architects claim, this startlingly
complex, structurally daring, Escher-like form is obviously not the only way
to fulfill this end, and it is certainly not the easiest one. There is something a
bit disingenuous about staking a claim to function in a building as
determinedly bizarre as this one. You know that it came to be in part because
engineers could get it built, something that could not have happened a decade
earlier.
But function is an elastic concept, and it is clear that the creation of a
memorable building that would make CCTV known throughout the world was
as much a part of this building’s program as anything about its offices and
production facilities. There is nothing wrong with this; architecture has been
serving as an identifying logo for large and powerful institutions forever. The
Parthenon, the Pantheon, Chartres, the Forbidden City, St. Peter’s, the
Kremlin, Versailles, the U.S. Capitol—the list is endless, and CCTV is
hardly the first corporation to join it. The Woolworth Building, the RCA
Building at Rockefeller Center, Johnson Wax, Lever House, and the Sears
Tower are just some of the many that came before. The question this building
raises is not whether it is appropriate for a corporation to want to be known
for a striking and unusual building but whether that building makes sense as a
public presence in the city. Does it seem only strange and willfully arbitrary,
the way the shape of the Hirshhorn Museum does? Or does the unusual shape
of CCTV play a valid role in the cityscape?
 Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, Office for Metropolitan Architecture,
CCTV headquarters, Beijing

In Beijing, it makes sense. The Beijing skyline is largely a confused

jumble of mediocre buildings, not only undistinguished but largely
indistinguishable. CCTV is the first truly memorable tall building in the city,
and it has already begun to function like the Empire State Building in New
York or the Sears Tower in Chicago or even, in some ways, like the Eiffel
Tower in Paris, as the tall element that is visible from many parts of the city
and can serve both as a symbol of the city and as an orienting device. The
CCTV building has the added advantage of looking different from different
directions, which makes it even more visually compelling. When you pass by
the building on Beijing’s elevated expressway or catch a glimpse of it down
the street, you cannot take your eyes off of it, and there are not many
buildings you can say that about.
A CCTV tower, where an enormously complicated set of functions is fit
into an entirely new kind of architectural shape, is not the kind of thing that
happens often. It’s much easier to fit all the different functional demands of a
building, just by the simple laws of geometry, into a building whose overall
shape isn’t something unusual like CCTV or a sphere or a pyramid or an
obelisk but is more along the lines of a rectangle, with straight sides and a
simple, slanted roof or a flat top. It’s easier to build those shapes, too. And it
is easier to fit them together into the combination of buildings that makes up a
street or a town square. It is no surprise that most buildings end up as some
form of rectangle.
How, then, does an architect assure that you and I will notice and
remember them? Sometimes, of course, being noticed isn’t what matters, but I
will say more about that in chapter 7. For now, let me say only that often the
aesthetics of a building come not from a single overall shape but from a
combination of shapes—a vertical slab set atop a horizontal slab, say, as
Gordon Bunshaft did in his pathbreaking Lever House in New York, where
the vertical slab appeared to float slightly over the horizontal slab, which
itself was set on columns so that it would appear to be floating above the
ground. Or the composition of shapes Oscar Niemeyer made iconic in
Brasilia, where he set a pair of identical slabs close together, making a
conventional form seem unusual by doubling it and then had the combination
play off against a horizontal section with a low dome and a reverse dome,
sort of like a dish. Niemeyer’s buildings loosely recall the combination of
forms an international consortium of architects created for the United Nations
in New York, where the swooping form of the General Assembly Building
serves as a counterpoint to the large, flat slab of the Secretariat Building and
the horizontal mass of the Conference Building. Or, to move away from large
office buildings and to a set of smaller residential buildings, there is the
combination of rectangles and squares that Charles Moore used in Sea
Ranch, his condominium complex on the Pacific coast north of San
Francisco, designed in the early 1960s with Donlyn Lyndon, William
Turnbull, and Richard Whitaker. This cluster of buildings is at once a set of
strong, sculptural masses set against the sea and a group of modest cottages
alluding to the simple, natural architecture of the farm shed. At Sea Ranch,
Moore managed to pull together what would later be thought of as opposing
strands of American architecture—the desire to create abstract, sculpted
mass and the desire to connect to history—into a strikingly beautiful
composition. Sheds were not reproduced literally here, of course: roofs were
pitched in just one direction to give the mass of each section a crisper, more
modern feel; there are skylights and projecting bays, and the structures are
sheathed in vertical redwood siding. Sea Ranch is a masterwork of graceful
restraint, standing front and center on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific. No
part of it would work without the whole—that, more than anything, is the
lesson of this composition of boxy masses. Here, the language of everyday
architecture makes a statement about the power of abstraction and, beyond
that, about the capability of a single work of architecture to suggest both
intimacy and monumentality.
When a building consists mainly of a single box, as so many do, and
neither is there an unusual shape nor are there multiple shapes to play off
against one another, how then to give it identity? In other words, how do you
make a box distinctive? The answer lies in the fact that the sides of a box do
not have to be blank. In fact, they rarely are. Exterior walls have windows
and doors, and moldings and cornices, and every other possible kind of
ornament. How these elements are arranged is often a more important act of
composition than the creation of the building’s shape or mass. The facade of
a building can be dominated by windows, which we usually read as voids, or
by walls, which we read as solids. The solids can be plain and flat, or they
can be richly decorated. A building’s facade can seem like a thin membrane
stretched tight across the structure, hiding the structure as a curtain might
cover a wall with an even, decorative pattern, as Pei and Cobb did in the
Hancock Tower in Boston. Or a facade can have depth and texture of its own,
as in the reinforced concrete apartment towers that I. M. Pei built in the early
1960s, like Kips Bay Plaza and Silver Towers in New York and Society Hill
Towers in Philadelphia. Or it can make the building’s structure an aesthetic
statement on its own, as Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan of Skidmore,
Owings and Merrill did in the John Hancock Center in Chicago, where
enormous X-braces across the facade provide variety for the eye, a reminder
of the building’s huge scale, and a sense of how the building is held up. In
some ways the Hancock Center was following a long tradition in Chicago of
using the facade of a tall building to reveal something about its underlying
structure. Many early Chicago skyscrapers contained a three-part window—
one wide section flanked by two narrow ones—in between structural
columns, a pleasing rhythm in which the varying thicknesses of vertical lines
made clear what was merely a division between windows and what was part
of the structure of the building. The “Chicago window” was more than
didactic, however; it was a compositional tool that different architects were
able to use in dozens of ways.

Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull and Whitaker, Sea Ranch, California

Most Chicago skyscrapers were designed to emphasize the vertical—

Louis Sullivan in particular created buildings that, though small by today’s
standards, appeared to soar, in large part because the vertical lines of their
facades were stronger than any other element, even Sullivan’s intricate and
elegant ornamentation. Sullivan’s facades were almost always three-part
compositions, consisting of a relatively solid base of one or two stories, a
main section containing eight or ten or more stories and strong vertical lines,
and then an elaborate top with a rich cornice. In the early days of skyscraper
design, the notion that the facade of a tower could be treated like a classical
column with a base, shaft, and capital was something of an aesthetic
breakthrough, since it represented a recognition that the design of a tall
building required not only a new kind of engineering but a new sense of
architectural aesthetics as well.
 J. P. Gaynor, Haughwout Building, New York

If architecture is composition, then composition can sometimes be pattern.

Repetition does not always guarantee refinement—indeed, it often produces
boredom. But in the Haughwout Building, one of the greatest of New York’s
remarkable inventory of nineteenth-century cast-iron industrial buildings, a
single pattern of classical elements, repeated over five floors, yields a
facade of extraordinary richness and harmony. It is worth looking hard at this
building to figure out why it all works so well. No element here is new; J. P.
Gaynor, the architect, invented nothing. It is all in how he put the pieces
together: five stories of windows, each within an arch set on miniature
Corinthian columns, or colonettes, and flanked by large Corinthian columns
set on paneled bases. An entablature and balustrade sit atop each story, with
a rich cornice atop the entire building.
What makes this one magic and so many other such facades that combine
classical elements pedestrian? Here, the detailing is crisp and precise, and
the depth exactly right to create a sense of texture and shadow, but never so
much as to make the building look as if it is made of something other than
metal and glass. (No one, in other words, could easily mistake the
Haughwout Building for a structure carved of stone.) More notable still is the
remarkable balance between the facade as a horizontal element and as a
vertical one—this pattern, like a good plaid, reads now as horizontal, now as
vertical. And the building itself feels like both a deep mass—a big block—
and a skin stretched taught over interior volume. You can stare at this facade
for hours and continue to see only richness in the classical dance its elements
perform, over and over again.
Rudolf Arnheim has best analyzed our shared perceptions of buildings in
his attempt to specify what shapes, proportions, and relations among parts
give pleasure. In The Dynamics of Architectural Form he observes that “the
dynamics of shape, color and movement is the decisive, although the least
explored, factor of sensory perception,” which is to say that the relation of
forms and masses to each other is key to how we relate to them. To Arnheim,
why some forms and masses relate well and others awkwardly is common
sense. We are most comfortable where there is a clear but not simplistic
order; where there is a balance between horizontal and vertical forces;
where the interior of a building bears some clear relation to the exterior;
where space is neither so undefined as to make our presence in it seem
inconsequential and thus confusing or irrelevant nor so rigidly and tightly
defined as to make us feel squeezed and oppressed by it.
Arnheim, who speaks of the horizontal as the “plane of action” and the
vertical as the “plane of vision,” brilliantly ties his observations about
architecture to what might be called intuitive perception in general: “The
ratio between rising and reposing, lightness and weight, independence and
dependence, is at the very core of the human sense of what life is and ought
to be, and as such it is a principle variable of style.” It is all a matter, he
concludes, of balance. Balance between light and heavy, close and near, tall
and short, bright and dim, active and calm, not unlike Rasmussen’s
conclusion. Elements must be in scale with each other and with us. This
could almost be a prescription for classical architecture, though to his credit,
Arnheim makes no attempt to limit his principles to classicism or any other
style.
Although few metaphors are more tired than that of architecture as music,
it is difficult not to think of harmonic proportion in music in connection with
balance in architecture. Visual balance is not so definable and measurable as
musical harmony, but the sense of discord in its absence is every bit as
marked. Elements must relate comfortably; they must appear to be
cooperating, to be part of a larger order, in the composing of a facade in
architecture as much as in the making of a musical sequence. Look, for
example, at the facade of Alberti’s great fifteenth-century church of Santa
Maria Novella in Florence, where columns, arches, pilasters, volutes, and
niches—a whole range of classical elements—are arranged to culminate in a
pediment; every aspect of this brightly colored facade seems organized to
bring your eye up and to give it a sense of pleasure and wholeness, just as a
musical composition carries your ear along. Every element is part of a larger
whole, and its place in that larger whole is essential, unmistakable, and
unchangeable. Take anything away, and the facade no longer works. Add
anything, and it seems excessive. All the elements seem to connect, and your
eye follows easily from one to the next, but what you sense is not the parts
but the whole. Now, to work this way hardly means that every part in an
architectural composition must be quite as similar as Alberti’s classical
elements—indeed, if they are too much the same they risk being dull, as in,
say, the bombastic attempts at classical architecture produced by Albert
Speer for the Nazis or the dreary, bureaucratic architecture produced by
twentieth-century governments of almost every political stripe. But an
architectural composition rarely succeeds if the elements that make it up are
so different that they appear to be in competition with one another. Severe
discord can sometimes work to make a point, but it should not be a steady
visual diet.
And too much plainness and too much order can be dull. Robert Venturi’s
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture contained his famous retort to
Mies van der Rohe’s mantra of “Less is more”: “Less is a bore.” Venturi
wrote this in 1966, and his book is often taken as a polemic along the lines of
Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, with Venturi playing Le
Corbusier’s opposite number, telling people not to reject history but to look
at it again and understand that it was never so simple as it was made out to
be. “Architecture is necessarily complex and contradictory in its very
inclusion of the traditional Vitruvian elements of commodity, firmness and
delight,” Venturi wrote. Venturi was actually less interested in offering up a
retort to Le Corbusier and other modernist zealots than he was in arguing the
aesthetics of architectural form and issuing a call for architecture to reflect
“the richness and ambiguity of modern experience,” which he felt that
orthodox modern architecture, with its focus on minimalist simplicity,
ignored. But through most of architectural history buildings have not been
pure and consistent, Venturi argued, and why should our time be different?
Venturi said he wanted architecture to be “hybrid rather than ‘pure,’
compromising rather than ‘clean,’ distorted rather than ‘straightforward,’
ambiguous rather than ‘articulated,’ perverse as well as impersonal, boring
as well as ‘interesting,’ conventional rather than ‘designed,’ accommodating
rather than excluding, redundant rather than simple, vestigial as well as
innovating, inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear. I am for
messy vitality over obvious unity…. I am for richness of meaning rather than
clarity of meaning.”

Leon Battista Alberti, facade, Santa Maria Novella, Florence

If literature and film and poetry and painting could reflect the ambiguities
of modern life, why couldn’t architecture, Venturi asked. He was right, of
course. Architecture has never been as simple as the modernist ideologues
would have it, and the best buildings, including the modernist ones, have
never fit any mold. Venturi’s book contains page after page of examples of
buildings by Borromini and Bramante and Michelangelo and Nicholas
Hawksmoor and Frank Furness and William Butterfield and Louis Sullivan
and even Le Corbusier himself, all to make the point that architectural
composition is a matter of inventiveness more than formula and that the
greatest buildings often do the least expected things.
Surprise is essential, and although the notion of ordered surprise may
appear to be an oxymoron, some degree of surprise is always going to be
present in any work of architecture that has the capability to move you. When
every element is predictable, order becomes a source not of comfort or
serenity but of banality. The building that works best is one in which there is
something that is different enough from what might normally be done as to
awaken us, even if we have seen it a hundred times before. The opening
chords of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or the sensuous forms amid color in
Matisse’s The Dance have something in common with Alberti’s Santa Maria
Novella, but also with the swooping arch of Louis Sullivan’s Owatonna Bank
in Minnesota and the delicate classical variations of Jefferson’s pavilions at
the University of Virginia. None of these buildings does things in quite the
expected way, but each one evokes a startling instant of pleasure no matter
how many times we have experienced it. So, too, with the crown of the
Chrysler Building and the split pediment of Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire
and the stacking of spire atop tower atop arched portico of Hawksmoor’s
Christ Church, Spitalfields, or the overpowering top floor of Robert
Smithson’s Wollaton Hall, near Nottingham, the great Elizabethan country
house; or the combination of a lyrical, curving facade facing the river and a
sharply angular facade facing the city at Alvar Aalto’s Baker House
dormitory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; or the way the
sumptuous and witty country villas of the great early-twentieth-century
English architect Sir Edwin Lutyens manage to distort the classical tradition
and to pay homage to it at the same time.
In every one of these buildings, the order of convention is combined with
the magic of invention. What they give us is not just unexpected but right; it
manages to be startling and yet still harmonious. We might say that it expands
our sense of what harmony can mean. And that may be as good a definition as
I can come up with for the balance to which all architecture must aspire: to
be both familiar and new, to provide both pleasure and serenity, order and
novelty, intensity and repose, somehow managing to make you feel both
equilibrium and a sense of revelation, all at once.
4
architecture as space
Space is “nothing”—a mere negation of the solid. And thus we
come to overlook it. But though we may overlook it, space
affects us and can control our spirit…. The architect models in
space as a sculptor in clay. He designs his space as a work of
art; that is, he attempts through its means to excite a certain
mood in those who enter it.
GEOFFREY SCOTT, The Architecture of Humanism

When you think of a building as an object, you think about its overall shape,
about the quality of its facade, and of how its other sides, if they are visible,
read as compositions. You think of it as mass and volume and bulk. You see it
in terms of line and color and materials. And you consider it in relation to the
buildings around it.
But of course there is another dimension entirely to buildings, and that is
the way they feel when you go inside them. Buildings are created to enclose
space. The reality of architecture consists as much of space as form, and the
nature and the feel of the space within a building can mean as much as
anything else about the building, and sometimes more. Space can feel large
and open, or it can feel small and confining. It also can feel large and
disorienting or small and protective. It can be exhilarating or oppressive. It
can feel generous or mean. It can feel clear or mysterious. It can feel soft or
hard; a space that is carpeted and paneled in wood will treat you more gently
than a space of exactly the same dimensions that has a terrazzo floor and
solid walls. And the same holds true for light. A space can be light or dim;
two rooms of the same size will feel altogether different if one has natural
light and the other is lit artificially, and in the room with artificial light, there
are infinite possibilities for varying the light, and each will change how you
perceive the space. Not for nothing did someone invent the phrase “mood
lighting.” In a similar vein, one space can be festooned with ornament and
another of the same size can be starkly pure, and they, too, will feel entirely
different. A space can be as confusing and difficult to navigate as the maze of
passages you follow if you are transferring between lines on the London
Underground or as matter-of-fact as the perfect cube of the main hall of the
Queen’s House by Inigo Jones in Greenwich, England, which is roughly
forty-five feet, seven inches high, forty-five feet, seven inches wide, and
forty-five feet, seven inches deep. A high space can be as neatly articulated
as the atrium of the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, where the corridors on
every floor take the form of balconies overlooking the big space, at once
providing texture and a sense of scale. Imagine the atrium in the Brown
Palace or in its most influential modern progeny, John Portman’s Hyatt
Regency in Atlanta, with nothing but plain solid walls. It would feel not
uplifting but oppressive. The nine-story-high central space in the Brown
Palace always seems to come on you as a surprise, which is part of its allure;
you are not attuned to expect a huge, spectacular room in the middle of a
stolid nineteenth-century hotel, and it is hard to suppress a sense of glee
when you walk into it.
Whatever form it takes, interior space will almost always provoke a
greater emotional response than the outside of a building does. Space can be
directed, and feel as if it were created to encourage you to move through it,
or it can be focused, and make you feel as if you do not need to move through
it to understand it. The Beijing International Airport by Norman Foster,
which is laid out in the shape of a huge funnel, is not only a spectacular space
with its high, swooping ceiling and generous natural light, it is a directional
space, since the shape quite literally funnels you from the large entrance
toward the security area and the gates. The Pantheon in Rome, the great
circular temple, does not make you want to move through it, and you feel as if
you understand it better if you stay put, under the perfect half-sphere of the
enveloping dome. When you are in the Pantheon, you feel as if the world
revolves around you; even if you are not in the very center of the great circle
(actually, the space is better experienced from off-center), you feel as if the
force of the space is focused on you, like a laser. You don’t want to move. To
move is to break the spell. What is supposed to move, you realize, is the
light, which comes into the space through the oculus, the round opening that is
at the very top of the dome, and lands on the floor in the form of a round disc
of sun.
We talk about facades in terms of how they look; we talk about spaces in
terms of how they feel. Great space—like the Unity Temple by Frank Lloyd
Wright or Sir John Soane’s breakfast room (see chapter 1) or Mies van der
Rohe’s Farnsworth House or Borromini’s Sant’Ivo church—makes you feel
something in the pit of your stomach. I don’t know any other way to describe
it. It is a sense of awe and contentment, somehow joined, and you feel as if
you have been jolted into a higher level of perception than you normally
have. If architecture is ever able to bring you to a state you might describe as
resembling nirvana, it will almost surely be because of a space you are in,
not because of a facade you are looking at. If it is difficult to quantify
aesthetics, it is utterly impossible to quantify the experience of being in great
architectural space. You feel amazement and curiosity, since you want to take
the pieces apart in your head and figure out how the architect did it. But you
also feel a serene pleasure in it exactly as it is, and you can go back and forth
between trying to understand how it was put together and simply absorbing
its intensity and letting it wash over you.

Interior view, Pantheon, Rome

Even more conventional spaces create distinct physical sensations. As I

said, some spaces feel directed and encourage movement, and others feel
focused and make us want to stay in one place, just as some places make us
feel compression and tightness while others make us feel relaxation and
openness. Some spaces seem to pull you toward the center; others push you
to the edges. A space with a lot of windows will almost always pull you
toward the view, and sometimes it can even feel more like an open balcony
facing a vista than an enclosed architectural space. When there is only glass,
as in Philip Johnson’s Glass House or Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth
House, the dividing line between inside and outside is unclear, and thus the
space itself becomes deliberately ambiguous. Curiously, the ambiguity is far
greater in Johnson’s house, which sits directly on the ground, with the grass
and trees at almost the same level as the floor, and your eye just carries your
gaze across the glass. The Farnsworth House is elevated several steps above
the ground and sits on a flat platform that has been designed to look almost as
if it is floating a few feet above the earth. Nature is framed by this space, and
you feel a clear sense of separation from it, even though the walls of glass
mean that you are looking at it all the time. You do not feel anything like a
normal sense of enclosure in the Farnsworth House, but neither do you feel
exposed. The best way to describe it is to say that you feel anchored by the
power of the frame, even as you float just above the level of the ground.

Philip Johnson, interior view, Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut

No two people respond to any architectural space in exactly the same

way. A large space that exhilarates some people may leave others feeling
adrift in the architectural equivalent of an open sea. A small space that
creates an exciting tension for some can induce claustrophobia in others. I
may find the swooping curves of Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at Kennedy
Airport to be sensual and comforting as they swirl around. This building
gives me a sense of sweet, low-key jubilance. You may walk into this same
building and feel that you have stepped into a cartoon, architecture made for
the Jetsons, and see only an oddly shaped curve above you, not a space that
seems almost to dance. I find that the curving concrete vaults in the ceiling
make me feel as if I am in a wonderful modernist tent; you may feel it is harsh
and, for all its fancy swoops, silly and therefore unwelcoming.

Eero Saarinen, interior view, TWA Terminal, John F. Kennedy Airport, New
York

To me, the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal is a kind of public

square for New York, a railroad’s gift to the city that is nearly a century old
and, if anything, more inviting than ever. Here, Beaux-Arts architecture did
what it did best, which was to use the traditional elements of classical and
Renaissance architecture to create beautiful and noble public places. Grand
Central is a vestibule to the city; here great space is used both to allow vast
numbers of people to move through easily and also to enhance the ritual of
arriving and leaving the city by housing it with appropriate ceremony. Grand
Central is the city’s symbolic front door, and it feels very different from, say,
the Port Authority Bus Terminal or the current version of Pennsylvania
Station, which is little more than a glorified subway station. When you come
into the city through Grand Central, you feel from the moment that you step
off the train that you are in a place that is capable of stirring your soul. You
have arrived, and it is this extraordinary space that tells you so. For all its
glory, however, the architects, Warren and Wetmore along with Reed and
Stem, knew how to organize things, and Grand Central is almost as
remarkable for the efficiency of its layout as for the beauty of its architecture.
Sometimes space can be spectacular and still difficult. The National
Building Museum, which is in the old Pension Building in Washington, has a
central space that is 316 feet long, 116 feet wide, and 159 feet high. It is
punctuated by two rows of massive Corinthian columns, among the largest
interior columns in the world, which divide it into thirds. The room, which is
really a covered courtyard, is stunning to behold, and as a space for a large
party it puts every Washington ballroom to shame. It has a kind of nineteenth-
century bombastic grandeur, the architectural equivalent of General Ulysses
S. Grant astride his horse, rough-hewn but with brass buttons gleaming. Most
of the events the museum holds in the space aren’t big enough to fill it,
however, and they tend to look like lonely remnants of something larger,
small crowds gathered in a space far too big for them. The very size of the
space seems to swallow up almost everything, and nobody looks anything but
puny beside those columns.
Warren and Wetmore, and Reed and Stem, main concourse, Grand Central
Terminal, New York

Montgomery Meigs, National Building Museum, Washington, D.C.

 Space, in one sense, is just what is left over when the architect finishes
building the structure. (That was literally the case with the Pension Building
—the architect, General Montgomery Meigs, constructed an office building
like a rectangular donut and put a roof over the hole, and he had his grand
space.) Until the nineteenth century, architects tended not even to talk about
space. They built rooms and courtyards and corridors, and halls and salons
and vestibules, and what they talked about wasn’t space as a concept in itself
but what form the walls and the windows and the moldings and the ceilings
took, since that is how they achieved the effects they were looking for. But
that hardly means that space was just what happened to fall in between the
walls. Although not all architects “model in space,” to use Geoffrey Scott’s
term, the creation of a particular kind of space is often the driving force in
creating a work of architecture. The quality of architectural space is never an
accident. Space is shaped. Many architects conceptualize a particular kind of
space first, and then create a structure that will allow it to be realized.
Saarinen’s primary motivation in the design of the TWA Terminal was almost
surely the creation of a soaring interior space, and the vaulted concrete shell
structure was his means of enabling it. Even more space-driven was
Saarinen’s design for the Ingalls Rink at Yale, where the whole point was to
give an ice rink a high, swooping roof, setting it within a space that would
seem by its very nature to symbolize movement. Saarinen was fond of
quoting a Yale hockey player who said that when he skated down the ice and
looked up at the concrete arch, it made him feel “Go, go, go.” As for the
TWA Terminal, Saarinen shaped the columns and the vaults to emphasize
uplift. This is not an earthbound building, it is a structure that feels about to
take off.
Saarinen believed he was creating a modern equivalent of Baroque space,
which (even though Baroque architects never used the word “space”) is
complex and full of intensity. “The Baroque architects were wrestling with
the same problem of creating dynamic space,” he said about the TWA
building. “Within the limits of the classical order and their technology, they
were trying to see how far they could go into a non-static architecture. At
TWA, we tried to take the discipline imposed by the concrete shell vault and
give it this non-static quality. In a sense, we were doing the same thing, only
using different play-blocks.”
 Eero Saarinen, Ingalls Rink, Yale University, New Haven

It is striking that Saarinen used the phrase “non-static” to speak of

Baroque architecture. The greatest Baroque spaces do not so much encourage
you to move within them as appear to be in movement themselves; they take
conventional spatial experience and bring it to the tenth power. How else to
explain Borromini? There are few spatial experiences more powerful than
being inside either of his two small churches in Rome, Sant’Ivo and San
Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, known as San Carlino. Borromini’s “play-
blocks,” to use Saarinen’s term, were the familiar classical elements of
architecture—columns, entablatures running across the top of the columns,
domes, and so forth. But he was obsessed with geometry, and he had the
ability to take common forms and shapes and combine them in such a way as
to produce extraordinary drama and surprise. The nave of San Carlino is
roughly elliptical in shape, but its walls undulate, and it is lined with sixteen
huge columns, almost too big for the room, which accentuate the feeling that
the entire space is a dynamic presence. The columns support an entablature
that runs all the way around the nave, reinforcing the sense of curvature;
above that are four coffered half-domes, and above that is an elliptical dome,
which resolves all of the intense activity below into a serene and even shape
at the top—as good a metaphor as you could imagine for the notion of earthly
pressure giving way to tranquillity in the heavens. “Space now seems
hollowed out by the hand of a sculptor, walls are molded as if made of wax
or clay,” Nikolaus Pevsner has written of this building, and that is the key
thing. Borromini took classical elements, which in the Renaissance were put
together to emphasize pure, rational order, and arranged them in such a way
as to create intense, fluid space.
Borromini did even more with geometric form at Sant’Ivo, a round chapel
of extraordinary intricacy and power. Its layout plan is itself an achievement
in geometry: Borromini started with a pair of triangles, one superimposed
upside down over the other to form a six-pointed star. Three points of the star
become semicircular recesses, and three are polygonal, with a slight
concave. Corinthian pilasters and a continuous entablature surround the
space, giving it an even rhythm and supporting a high, slender dome that is
made up not of a round drum but of vaults that carry all of the concave and
convex lines straight up to the top, culminating in a circle that supports a
lantern. Everything seems designed to thrust your eye upward, and it does.
The all-white space, highly unusual for a seventeenth-century Baroque
church, makes it feel even more abstract and modern. This is half Baroque
church, half rocket ship. You look up, to the light, and to the fullness of this
tight, narrow space within the dome, and you feel, quite literally, as if you
are about to rise upward. I do not know that I have ever seen a better
metaphor for the notion of architecture and religious redemption. As you
move through Sant’Ivo you feel compression, release, and transcendence.
Here is the faith, manifest—faith in humanity as well as God, since the real
lesson of Sant’Ivo is that transcendence can come through the careful and
creative application of earthly truths. Every ingredient Borromoni uses is
visible and available to anyone. It is what he does with them that makes this
church so utterly sublime. At Sant’Ivo, simple geometries are somehow
combined to create a work of architecture that embraces the deepest
complexities of human imagination, a space that has at once the clarity of the
Renaissance and the mystery of the Gothic.
 Francesco Borromini, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome

Francesco Borromini, Sant’Ivo, Rome

The spatial quality of architecture is something you often begin to feel before
you pass through the door. In an essay called “Whence and Whither: The
Processional Element in Architecture,” Philip Johnson wrote that what he
called procession, the experience of moving through a building, was actually
the most important element of all in architecture: “Architecture is surely not
the design of space, certainly not the massing or organizing of volumes.
These are auxiliary to the main point, which is the organization of
procession. Architecture exists only in time.”
Johnson exaggerated for rhetorical effect, of course, since he hardly
believed that shape and massing were not important. But he was not wrong.
Architecture does exist in real time, and our experience of it is frequently a
function of our movement toward it and through it. Is there anyone who has
not found the approach to the Taj Mahal as moving and as powerful as the
building itself, if not more so? Or felt the sense of mounting drama as you
walk down the center aisle of a church? And, to turn to everyday experience,
think of the pleasure of approaching an attractive suburban house by walking
from the street to the front door, as the facade looms larger with each step,
the Taj Mahal experience in miniature. Most of the time today, sad to say, this
experience is lost when people arrive by car and drive to the side or the rear,
and more often than not enter through a garage and a back door, missing
everything. Rare are the houses, even new ones, that are designed to accept
the reality of the automobile not by putting it in a back or side garage and
forcing everyone to use a back door but by a design that somehow makes the
fact of arrival by car as a central idea, organizing a whole facade around
automobile arrival so as to use it as a way to heighten rather than obscure
architectural experience.
Frank Lloyd Wright had the notion of movement through his architecture
always in mind. His characteristic low entrances were intended to give us a
sense of compression, to make the sensation as you move into a larger space
beyond the entrance all the more dramatic. That is why you enter the
Guggenheim Museum not directly into Wright’s extraordinary, seven-story-
high rotunda but into a low vestibule, and only after that does Wright’s great
space reveal itself. Wright was nothing if not cinematic, and he designed
always with an awareness of how people would move through his buildings
and a desire to control that movement as best he could, like a director pacing
the story as it unfolds. It is a lesson that General Meigs, architect of the
Pension Building in Washington, never understood. The real problem with
that space is that you pop right into it. There is no surprise, and nothing
unfolds in stages. You go through the door, and then, boom—there you are,
right under the 159-foot ceiling, with all that space sprawling out before you.
 “The beauty consists in how you move into the space,” Philip Johnson
wrote, knowing more than Meigs. Johnson understood that we first
experience architecture from afar, watch it change as we move closer, and
have (if we are lucky) an experience of great drama as we move, step by
step, into it. And then we see it in different ways again when we stand inside
and move around within its spaces. Architecture reveals itself in stages as
we move toward it, and then space unfolds in stages as we move within it.
We may talk about proportion and materials and scale and composition
when we stand still and look at a building, but that is still fundamentally a
two-dimensional experience. Space adds a third dimension, and movement
through space brings yet another dimension to the experience, the fourth
dimension of time. So does movement toward a building. The impact of some
buildings is greatest at considerable distance—the Empire State Building is a
more fully realized, beautiful form from several blocks away (or even from
across the Hudson River) than it is when you stand at its own front door. I
would rather see it from afar than from close by, and its interior is its least
compelling aspect by far. (The most meaningful thing to do inside the Empire
State Building is to look out from it: the building provides not so much any
spatial experience in itself as a vantage point from which to view the entire
city as if it were a single, vast work of architectural space.)
Chartres Cathedral exists in one form rising above the wheat fields of
Beauce, in another as it commands the main square of the village of Chartres,
and in still another when we enter its nave. First we see it as mass from afar,
in the context of a regional landscape, with no sense of its texture or
materials and only the most abstract impression of its shape; then, as part of a
village, dominated by the form and feeling of its stone and its details now
crisply and powerfully visible, and finally from within, as the light and color
of the stained glass join with the stone vaults to define the nature of the
space. Seeing Chartres in each of these ways is part of the experience of the
building. All are necessary to understand it, and they need to be seen one
after the other, as you move through space toward the cathedral.
It is hard to underestimate the importance of the connection between
movement and architecture, even when you are not inside a building. A
Baroque facade in Rome symbolizes movement even if you are standing still.
Of course the point is not to stand still but to experience it as you move
toward it. Indeed, you miss one of the best things about it if you are not
conscious of how you approach it, which is almost always not on a grand,
formal axis but quite suddenly, as a surprise: many of the greatest churches
look as if they had been shoved into tiny piazzas, like enormous pieces of
furniture, and you come upon them in an instant as you turn a corner. It is not
just the beauty of the facade that strikes you but the way in which it springs
upon you. One moment you are walking down a narrow, twisting street, and
the next moment you are confronting overflowing architectural glory. A
Baroque facade speaks of texture most of all—of curves, of depths and
shadows, of decoration that is assertively three-dimensional. It is
architecture of the highest order of sensuality. You may find that it wreaks of
excess, or you may feel that it represents the closest that built form has come
to representing ecstasy, but you are not likely to ignore it.
If architectural space connects inevitably to movement, a building’s plan,
its interior layout, is the guide to that movement. The floor plan is the
building’s map. It does not literally represent space, but it implies space. A
plan, you might say, is a two-dimensional diagram of a building’s three-
dimensional reality. The plan of Sant’Ivo does not show you the
extraordinary nature of Borromini’s space, but it shows you the basis for his
thinking, the beginning of his process of design, and you cannot begin to
understand this complex and magnificent space without first understanding
the plan. In a building of many rooms, the plan shows us the architect’s ideas
for how spaces are arranged and for what your experience will be as you
move from one to the next. You can see from a plan how you enter and where
you go from there: what choices you have when you move beyond the
entrance, which spaces are major and which ones are minor, and how they all
relate to one another. It shows that spaces have a hierarchy as well as a
sequence. Some spaces are grand and public and ceremonial, others more
intimate and social, and others purely utilitarian, and this is true whether you
are talking about a split-level suburban house or the Vatican.
Floor plans are often the best way in which to trace the evolution of some
types of architecture, such as apartment houses and office buildings. In the
late nineteenth century, when the first large apartment houses were being built
in the United States, they tended to have rooms strung out in rows or set along
extended, narrow corridors, a fairly primitive arrangement that prevailed
even in such grand buildings as the Dakota, Henry Hardenbergh’s magnificent
Manhattan structure of 1884. It wasn’t until around World War I that
architects figured out that it was much more graceful, not to mention efficient,
to lay out apartment suites around a large foyer. The floor plans tell the story.
Similarly, in the days before air conditioning, office buildings and hotels
were laid out around courtyards and air shafts to assure that every occupant
was close to a window; they had numerous small rooms and often long
corridors that made complex turns. Many buildings had floor plans that
looked like the letter “E.” Today’s office buildings have large, open floors,
and hotels tend to be narrow, even slabs. The floor plans show it all.
At the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the great French academy that was,
for all intents and purposes, the first true architectural school, the ability to
create a clear, logical, and elegant plan was considered as important as any
aspect of designing a building. The Beaux-Arts architects believed that from
a good plan, other good elements logically flowed, and without a good plan,
a building could not fully succeed, no matter how elegant its facade or
extravagant its interior spaces. The plan was the basis of everything. It was
the document that ordered the spaces in the architect’s mind and translated
that order and logic into the actual experience of being in a building. You can
sometimes understand more about a building by looking at its plan than about
anything else. A photograph of the facade or of the central rotunda of the
National Gallery of Art in Washington by John Russell Pope (which is
discussed further in chapter 6) will show you the austere classical grandeur
of Pope’s architecture, but a look at the floor plan will tell you something that
goes even more to the essence of the building, which is how Pope organized
it symmetrically around the rotunda as a series of galleries, set in sequence
around wide corridors, with breaks for sunlit garden courts. It is serene and
ordered yet full of variation, always clear and logical yet never boring. You
cannot get lost here, as you can at so many traditional museums, but neither
are you likely to feel as if you are traipsing through room after identical
room, with no relief. The floor plan explains it all, and when you look at it,
you can see how Pope designed the building to encourage a sense of
promenading through a sequence of galleries and to assure that visitors have
the chance to vary their routes and yet never lose a sense of where they are.
 John Russell Pope, floor plan, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Mies van der Rohe’s floor plans, as in the Barcelona Pavilion, designed
for the 1929 International Exhibition, show a sense of continuous space,
punctuated by the brief lines of short walls; it is almost like an abstract
composition. The plan of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye helps you understand
one of the critical elements of that great modernist house, the way in which
curving walls play off against a rectangular frame. If you look at a floor plan
for one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s great early houses, such as the Ward Willets
House in Highland Park, Illinois, of 1902, or the Robie House in Chicago, of
1909, you can see exactly what Wright was doing: opening up space,
breaking apart the traditional rooms to make space seem to flow horizontally
outward rather than to be focused inward. Yes, you can learn that from a
photograph, too, but a photograph will not show you how Wright envisioned
movement through the house. The plan will.
 Mies van der Rohe, floor plan, Barcelona Pavilion

A plan is of little help, however, in understanding a building like Paul

Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building (now Paul Rudolph Hall) at Yale,
which I discuss in more detail in chapter 6. The building ostensibly has
seven floors, but it really has roughly thirty-five levels, most of them small
areas that are slightly up or down from one of the main floors. A section,
which is a drawing of the building in a cutaway view, as if a knife had sliced
through its middle, is the only diagram that makes much sense in this case.
Rudolph was an architect who thought in three dimensions; like Sir John
Soane, his spaces penetrated from one to the other, interconnecting vertically
and horizontally in so many ways as to make the traditional idea of a room
enclosed by four walls all but irrelevant. “The best architect is the one who
knows how to waste space best,” Rudolph said. His use of the word “waste”
was slightly disingenuous, since he hardly thought he was tossing away space
as useless. What he meant was that architecture should be measured not just
in efficiency but in how creatively an architect could use space for aesthetic
effect. Rudolph delighted in creating space that had a powerful emotional
impact, and he almost always did it through compositions of straight lines,
not through the fluid, voluptuous curves of his contemporary Eero Saarinen
or of Frank Gehry a generation later. Louis Kahn similarly created great
drama by brilliant arrangement of seemingly straightforward elements at the
First Unitarian Church in Rochester, a building that seems rough, even cold,
at first but that turns out to be profoundly spiritual, a magnificent joining of
the softness of light to the hardness of concrete—or is it the hardness of light
and the softness of concrete? It is Kahn’s genius that allows us to experience
it both ways.

Paul Rudolph, cutaway view, Art and Architecture Building (now Paul
Rudolph Hall), Yale University, New Haven

Long before Kahn, in 1909 Frank Lloyd Wright made a composition of

straight lines into an architectural drama of the highest order at Unity Temple,
his Unitarian church in Oak Park, Illinois, its sanctuary a room that seems at
once as protected as a cave and as open to nature as a tent. Unity Temple was
helped, as was almost always the case in Wright’s work, by a brilliantly
controlled sequence of spatial experiences that take you across the building,
down through a lower level, and then up into the glorious interior space. It is
a movement toward openness and light, an ascension in every sense of the
word.
It shouldn’t be all that surprising that so many great architectural spaces
have been created for religious purposes. Not only is a religious building a
circumstance in which it seems justified to use space extravagantly, but the
very nature of a spiritual quest would seem to transcend the usual limits on
architectural creativity. Le Corbusier, in designing his chapel at Ronchamp,
in eastern France—the building, completed in 1955, shocked many
modernists with its use of curving, almost free-form shapes—spoke of
“ineffable space” as being central to the mission of designing a place of
worship. The building was criticized as “irrational” by Nikolaus Pevsner,
who grudgingly noted, “Some visitors say that the effect is movingly
mysterious.”
Not only curving walls can yield “ineffable space.” Tadao Ando’s Church
of the Light outside Osaka, Japan, of 1989, is a simple rectangle of smooth
concrete, sliced through by a freestanding wall set at a fifteen-degree angle to
the rectangle, as if it were a huge panel that had been swung on a hinge. The
angled wall yields a small vestibule and an entrance to the chapel, which
fills the rest of the rectangle. At the far end, facing the congregation, the wall
is broken by an immense cross cut all the way through the concrete, so that
light shines through. Light also enters from above the angled wall and through
a large window positioned so that it looks into the angled wall, bringing
reflected light onto the concrete. The room is crisp and clean, and the
concrete has the beauty of fine plasterwork. But the room is not simple. The
light and shadow join with the concrete to create something that feels at once
rational and unexplainable—perhaps the most moving small chapel since
Ronchamp.
In Gates of the Grove, a synagogue in East Hampton, New York,
completed in 1989, Norman Jaffe created a sanctuary of wood, glass, and
Jerusalem stone in which the whole idea of walls and ceilings is blurred.
Jaffe designed walls in the form of great columns of wood that rise up, then
slant backward forty-five degrees, then cross the room and descend on the
other side, creating a series of great arcs. In between the arcs, but largely
hidden, is glass, so that light enters the space from above, indirectly. It pays
homage in a distant way to the old wooden synagogues of rural Poland,
particularly on the outside. But it also has a certain similarity to Wright’s
Unity Temple, not in appearance—the two buildings could not be more
different—but in how in both buildings you feel a remarkable balance
between openness and enclosure, between being free and exposed, and being
nurtured and protected. The light enters from unusual places in both
sanctuaries, and the indirect natural light helps to shape and mold the
character of the space. Jaffe, like Wright, was able to make rectangular,
orthogonal space have the intricacy and, even more important, the mystery of
complex, organically shaped space. That is no small achievement—to take a
rectangular or square room and give it the mysterious aura of something
transcendent.
 Tadao Ando, Church of the Light, outside Osaka, Japan

Norman Jaffe, Gates of the Grove (Jewish Center of the Hamptons), East
Hampton, New York

In the sanctuary of the synagogue, as in all great religious buildings,

something takes us a bit away from the secular life, away from the rational. In
this space Jaffe tried to create a physical echo of thought, of contemplation—
a space in which light tumbles in softly, from sources we cannot always see;
space in which physical support, too, is almost mysterious, with the odd
angles of the arcs over you, space in which color and texture seem constantly
to change in the light. The sanctuary is a room of beautiful serenity, yet one of
action and movement at the same time. It pulls you forward; it holds you
back. It seems to embrace you as it leaves you to your privacy. It joins
people together; it encourages them to reflect in solitude. Like Sant’Ivo,
Unity Temple, and Ronchamp, it is a product of rational thought, yet it seems
somehow irrational, mysterious. Ultimately this is space that has been
created to tell us that for all we know, there is something we do not know—
something that we will never be able to understand.
5
architecture and memory
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the
lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings
of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the
lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in
turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
ITALO CALVINO, Invisible Cities
This was the London of my childhood, of my moods and my
awakenings: memories of Lambeth in the spring; of trivial
incidents and things: of riding with mother on top of a horse-
bus trying to touch lilac trees—of the many coloured bus-
tickets, orange, blue, pink and green, that bestrewed the
pavement where the trams and buses stopped … of melancholy
Sundays and pale-faced parents and children escorting toy
windmills and coloured balloons over Westminster Bridge.
From such trivia I believe my soul was born.
CHARLES CHAPLIN, My Autobiography

Visual perception plays an obvious role in how we respond to architecture—

our inherent sense of such things as proportion and scale, and of the way
some materials feel harsh and other materials feel soft, or how some shapes
suggest openness and others enclosure. Most people experience these
physical elements of a building in roughly similar ways—if a building feels
big to me, it is not likely to feel cozy and intimate to you. I want to consider
now, however, another aspect of architectural experience, one that is
different for every one of us and much harder to quantify but that, in the end,
is probably more important: the role of memory. We each have our memories
of buildings and places, our experiences of architecture that we have lived in
or worked in or traveled to see, our versions of Chaplin’s trams and bus
tickets and colored balloons over Westminster Bridge. These memories set a
tone for the way we experience the new, since to a significant degree we
perceive buildings that are new to us by how they fit into a worldview that is
formed by the architecture we have seen before, even if we do not actively
remember it.
It is natural to find comfort in the familiar. That doesn’t mean that we
necessarily want buildings to look like ones we have seen before—that’s true
for some people, of course, and it certainly helps to explain the fondness so
many people have for new buildings that look like the architecture of the
past. But memory doesn’t have to demonstrate its power in such a literal
fashion. Sometimes it is more a matter of what sort of general cultural
upbringing you have had. A skyscraper means one thing to a person who
grew up in the shadow of the Empire State Building and something altogether
different to someone who grew up in Iceland—and one thing to a person who
was taken to the top of the Empire State Building at age six, another to a
person who never heard of it, and quite another to a person who yearned to
visit it and never did. A person growing up in Japan may have a sense of
private space as tiny, delicate, and very much to be cherished; someone who
grew up in an Italian villa may perceive private space as a kind of boundless
natural resource. The child who first experienced public space in the plaza of
a Spanish town will have a sense of the public realm as a far more natural
part of life than the child who grew up in Los Angeles, for whom public
space was little more than a tiny playground, often reached by car rather than
foot, and for whom the most significant experience of being in public
consisted of riding in a closed car along the freeway.
We associate buildings with other buildings we remember or buildings we
remember thinking about, which sometimes can loom larger in our minds than
the ones we actually experienced. Sometimes the things we feel most
attracted to are those we once aspired to and never had, architecture that
exists, you might say, in the memory of dreams. On this notion Walt Disney
invented Disneyland and built an empire. One of the most compelling images
in the classic American film Miracle on Thirty-fourth Street is the magazine
photograph of a house in the suburbs that a little girl who lives in a small city
apartment keeps folded in her bedside drawer, her secret fantasy. (At the end
of the film, of course, the girl moves into the house—not a house of the same
general type but the very house in her picture, a twist of the plot that if
nothing else sends the message that buildings are not, in fact, generic and
interchangeable and that the ones that matter the most to us are real and very
specific.)
 Like the little girl, many of us react against our experience and feel
attracted to buildings and places that are altogether different from ones we
have known. The desire to seek what is counter to our memories exists not
only in the case of people who grew up in cramped city apartments and crave
suburban houses with huge expanses of lawn; there are also people who
grew up in one culture who respond viscerally to the physical surroundings
of another—Europeans who love Los Angeles, Americans who feel at home
in Japan, and people from small towns anywhere who experience a
quickening of the pulse whenever they approach a large city and who
instinctively judge buildings at least as much by how close they are to a
center of energy as by whether they provide light or quiet or a sense of
serenity. To them, excitement is beauty, and if that idea seems to transcend the
visual, think of Times Square, where to almost everyone visual excitement
takes on a quality approaching beauty.

My own architectural memories are not unlike Chaplin’s, a series of

seemingly random, tiny images. I recall the buildings and the streets of my
childhood intensely, but there was nothing terribly special about them. No
architectural historian would give any of them a second glance. But that is, in
part, the very reason they are worth recalling for a moment here, because of
the way their ordinariness affected and shaped my architectural memory. The
large public building I remember most clearly is my neighborhood
elementary school, three elongated stories of orange brick, which in memory
takes the form of a great Elizabethan manor house but which must surely have
been much cruder. It had a modern addition, low and sleek in the manner of
the early 1950s. I remember liking both the new and the old, and most of all
the contrast between them. My eclectic sensibility must have been formed
early. The new seemed so sleek and clean, the old so vast and shadowy; each
was complete in itself, yet here they were literally jammed together. They
both seemed altogether natural to me.
This little complex of school buildings marked one end of my immediate
world; the other was a few blocks away, in the two-family house where my
family lived on the first floor and my grandparents lived upstairs. The house
had a tiny backyard and even less of a front yard, and it sat at the end of a
long block of similar houses, houses that had a narrow side facing the street
with a front door that nobody used except the mailman. Our house and every
one of its neighbors was not very wide but quite deep, a kind of freestanding
row house, not so different from the genre of houses in Queens that the world
would later identify with Archie Bunker. The street was a place: I felt it then,
even though I could hardly have articulated it. Each house was not so much a
self-contained unit as a part of a larger whole, a box from which to view the
opera of the street itself. We moved back and forth, up and down, house to
house, yard to yard, playing sometimes in the street, more often on the
sidewalk. The interiors belonged to us, to the private doings of our families;
everything else was public, and it belonged to everyone.
I know that the sense of the street as a kind of public realm that I felt in the
1950s in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Passaic, New Jersey, had
something to do with the way I look at cities today. That part of Passaic was
a rather miraculous kind of almost-suburb, balanced perfectly, if
accidentally, between urban density and suburban sprawl. It had neither the
roughness of the city nor the lushness of the country, but it was a perfect
place for a child to see and feel for himself the qualities of a kind of urban
village. I remember the street around the corner, lined with stores and a gas
station (I did not know enough then to think of the gas station as a form of
blight; I recall only the Esso “Happy Motoring” sign as being the first time I
learned to read in script). The rounded corner entrance of Wilbern’s
Pharmacy, framed in black and chrome, and the classical dignity of the
facade of the Bank of Passaic remain in my mind; so does the long soda
fountain counter in Eleanor’s candy store. And so does what must have been
the most exciting local event in the years I lived in this neighborhood, a
drama that also involved buildings: the dynamiting of a pair of two-family
houses around the corner to make way for a new supermarket. The entire
neighborhood gathered to watch the public spectacle, as striking a way of
watching old architecture give way to new as any six-year-old would be
likely to see a block away from his door.
If I was lucky to have spent my first years in a definable, measurable
world, in scale with the feelings of a child, I was equally lucky in my house,
a woefully ordinary piece of architecture, six rooms arranged more or less in
a row, with no circulation space to speak of. For me it existed, in effect, in
two versions: my family’s flat downstairs and my grandparents’ virtual
duplicate above. But the two were the same in plan only, for our house bore
the mark of my parents’ early flirtation with modernism. They owned Knoll
furniture, a platform couch and chairs of pale woods, whereas the flat above
was rich and heavy, with deep upholstery, dark woods, and odd little things
my grandmother called doilies all about. I could see that it was the same, and
I could see that it was altogether different.
I could not have articulated this as a six-year-old, but it got through
somehow, and my contention is that all of us see and feel and are shaped by
the experience of early physical surroundings in a way that is not so different
from what happened to me. We create from such specifics a kind of general
sensibility. Can there be a better way to start thinking about architecture and
cities than by growing up in a place that is as calm and ordinary as the one in
which I began? It was a nurturing beginning, but not so comfortable as to
have made me want to spend the rest of my life there (we moved away when
I was eight, and I have never wanted to return), yet manageable and in scale
with a child’s reality. Would I have loved cities so much had I been raised in
New York? Would I have loved architecture so much had Chartres Cathedral
been down the street? Would I have found majesty to be ordinary? Would my
eye have been cursed as a result?
The familiar has a pernicious power; it can render glory banal.
Familiarity does not really breed contempt, but it often breeds indifference,
which is worse. Years after I had left Passaic I learned that something I had
been seeing day after day, only a mile or so from our house, was one of the
most remarkable, not to say bizarre, urban vistas in the world: a train track
that ran down the middle of Main Avenue in downtown Passaic. It was a
staggering sight—real trains, not trolleys, vast, noisy, magnificent objects
rushing down tracks that ran right in front of the city’s grandest stores, but to
me it was routine, barely noticed, hardly remembered. It is startling only in
memory.
So I was fortunate to have landed in this curious place between other
places and thus to have learned, subliminally if not consciously, the virtues of
ordinariness, the allure of urbanity, and the pleasures of small town and
village life, simultaneously. There was enough urbanity to tempt, enough
smallness to comfort and protect. And there were lessons, too, in the way that
my grandparents’ house upstairs was like ours downstairs yet not the same at
all: even the least visual child could see how powerfully the different tastes
of my parents and grandparents made the raw material of these outwardly
identical rooms into separate and distinct worlds.
Before my age could be stated in double digits, we left Passaic and
moved to a “real” suburb, Nutley, a nearby town where we lived in a
medium-sized, shingled Queen Anne–style house with a splendid round
porch of fieldstone; if this was not quite architecture with a capital A, it was
a step up in the world from where we had been, and I could feel the
difference in more than just bigger rooms and more space for running around.
This house had a presence. It was complex, with attics and basements and
funny little rooms and big triangular gables. My parents referred to it as
“Victorian,” and even though it was probably built just after the Victorian
period, it definitely felt as if it had a history. I remember being told by my
mother that the architect was William A. Lambert, which she believed gave
the house a certain cachet; though Lambert was no Stanford White, he had
built many of the best rambling, shingled houses in the area. I felt that the new
house had the resonance of time, though I doubt that it was very much older
than the house we had left.
Through our new house I began to sense the power of the individual
building. I already felt the power of community, which gave me an advantage
over many people with more purely suburban upbringings, who only later, if
at all, grasp the importance of buildings coming together in groups to make a
place. There was, of course, plenty of sense of place beyond my new house
here, too, but I remember it all as disconnected, as things invariably are in
towns where most movement takes place in automobiles. Franklin Avenue,
the main street of town, a kind of stretched-out commercial strip out of
American Graffiti, struggled to maintain some degree of urbanism against
forces far greater than it, or the town, could cope with. It persisted, not quite
a place for a promenade, but not entirely ruined by the malls outside of town
either. The local supermarket survived by making itself more and more like a
freestanding store, its owners tearing down everything on one side, and then
on the other side, and finally across the street, to provide more parking.
Eventually—I was long gone by then—it came to look like a cross between a
warehouse and a mall, cut off entirely from the streets around it.
Yet this town taught me plenty beyond these negative examples. It had a
glorious sense of village symbolism: a center with a town hall, firehouse,
police headquarters, public library, and high school all clustered around the
American community’s true heart, a football field. I don’t know a more
perfect expression of the public realm this side of Philadelphia’s City Hall,
whose great tower anchors the center of the urban grid, a visible monument
to civic order—unless it would be Siena, in Tuscany. I could not have known
it at the time, but the way things were laid out in Nutley was rare for an
American community, even for one whose history went back to before the
automobile eviscerated the centers of most American towns and cities. In
Nutley, the focal point of town wasn’t a mall, and it wasn’t a set of strip
malls along a six-lane road. It was a street, and a square, and a football field.
The architecture wasn’t much, but the priorities were absolutely clear. No
house, no business, no private institution took precedence over the needs of
the people. The public realm possessed the heart of the town, unequivocally.
If Nutley was unusual in the way in which its layout made the quality of its
town-ness so evident, it had another strange quality that served me well: it
was balanced unintentionally, but perfectly, between isolation and connection
to other places. Of thirty thousand people who lived there, it seemed that half
could have been in Nebraska, for all they felt connected to New York, a mere
ten miles to the east. But there were also plenty of commuters, and their
presence dusted the town with the sophistication of the urban region of which
it was a part, even though it never fully took hold, and so the town was
farther from New York in spirit than in fact. The consequence of this is that I
grew up knowing something about a great city and something about life in a
small town, never feeling fully a part of either, a mulatto of urban sensibility.
The city had a tremendous allure for me, as it did for many suburban kids
growing up in the 1960s, and part of the reason I found it appealing was no
different from what every other suburban kid felt: it represented freedom,
glamour, and escape from convention. But to me there was also a visceral
excitement, a true physical thrill, in the buildings themselves, their size and
shape and energy. This place was not only big and bad, it was also the
Emerald City, aglow with beauty and bedazzlement. I obsessed over New
York; it was where all things were possible, and architecture was the proof
of its magical power.
The architecture I perceived as a kind of wholeness, an urban feeling,
much more than a matter of specific buildings. I saw the city as one vast,
complicated, enticing object, full of peaks and valleys and nooks and
crannies, but one big, interlocking thing, a product of nature like Yellowstone
or Yosemite as much as a serendipitous collection of man-made elements.
Perhaps a better comparison would be to a huge interior, for it all felt set
apart from nature: one enormous room that stretched on for miles in which
one could escape from the smallness of the rest of the world. What I recall
from long ago as the furnishings for this room are the hexagonal paving
blocks around Central Park and the rock outcroppings within it, the walls of
buildings defining the hard edges of the park, and the buildings tightly set
along crowded streets, and the sense of monumentality in great museums and
theaters and stores, and the subway, which played as big a role in defining
my sense of what the city looked like as any piece of architecture. I have only
the dimmest memories of the Empire State Building or Rockefeller Center,
but I remember clearly walking past a hole and seeing a sign saying that this
excavation was to become the Time-Life Building. Somehow I never
managed to see Pennsylvania Station before it was destroyed in 1963, and
since I entered the city through the grungy reaches around the Port Authority
Bus Terminal and Times Square, I barely recall Grand Central at all. My
introduction to New York was not a tour of its great architecture; it was the
legacy of comfort provided by the idea of the street itself and by the notion
that a city as a whole must be greater than the sum of its parts.
I had no idea that I was getting, more or less by osmosis, the ultimate
urban lesson. All I knew was that the place felt right. I loved buildings and
paid attention to them as I walked through the city, but I had no conscious
sense that I was learning something essential about architecture when I
sensed that New York’s aura of wholeness, of coherence, was more powerful
even than its great landmarks. There seemed to be nothing strange about
coming to know and feel New York without as yet having seen the Brooklyn
Bridge or Trinity Church or the New York Public Library. The essence of the
city oozed from every street.
The Seagram Building and the Guggenheim Museum were only a few
years old in those days, and the gargantuan transformation that postwar
architecture would make to the fabric of the city was barely felt as the 1950s
turned into the 1960s. Soon enough the glass boxes would come, and faster
than anyone could have imagined, but at that point they were something of a
novelty, and all the more pleasing for that. How wonderfully Mies van der
Rohe’s great Seagram Building played off against the masonry buildings that
surrounded it and—as we learned only later, when they began to disappear—
were its essential counterpoint. The city then was solid, literally solid in the
sense of being made of masonry, and conceptually solid in the way it felt like
an ordered ensemble of many buildings that still sang in more or less the
same key. When I first began to know New York you never heard the
expression “urban fabric,” not because the idea did not exist but because it
was taken so much for granted that no one had to say it. By the end of the
1960s things would be different, as glass boxes spread everywhere, not
elegant ones like what Mies had created for Seagram, but cheap, tawdry
imitations, and the tight physical form of the city fell into disarray. But that is
a story for later. For now, New York served as a solid frame, a rock of
Cartesian order, against which my sense of place could develop.
I don’t want to suggest with all this talk of place and urban fabric that I
had no interest in architecture itself. I was passionate about new buildings,
so much so that I devoured any material I could find on architects and the
structures of the early 1960s. Friends of my parents, perhaps perplexed by
the extent of my obsession, decided not to fight it and in 1963 gave me a pair
of gifts that would deepen my interest still further: a subscription to
Progressive Architecture magazine and a monograph on the work of Eero
Saarinen, who had died a year or so before. The first issue of the magazine
that came had on its cover the Art and Architecture Building at Yale, by Paul
Rudolph, which had just opened, the latest addition to the remarkable series
of modern buildings Yale had commissioned over the past decade. The
Saarinen book showed his designs for the Yale hockey rink and new
dormitories. I decided pretty much then, at age thirteen, that I was going to
Yale because I liked its buildings.
I eventually came up with some more reasonable, if less inventive,
reasons for going to Yale, and I arrived in New Haven in the odd
circumstance of having a lot of its famous new architecture firmly in my
mind. I liked it just fine, but what really swept me away was not the new
architecture I had seen in books but the part of the campus that modern
architectural historians and critics had most disdained, the imitation Gothic
and Georgian buildings of the first four decades of the century. Once again,
the world was teaching lessons, but at Yale they reached me more directly
than those I had learned in New York: I was entranced by the work of James
Gamble Rogers, the architect who designed most of Yale’s Gothic and
Georgian architecture of the 1920s and 1930s. Rogers’s determinedly
nonideological stance, his avoidance of theory in favor of what can only be
called intuitive design, was liberating. It was all right for architecture to be
about feeling good, I suddenly realized; stage sets were not immoral. It was
the perfect epiphany for a twenty-year-old who was just beginning to learn
about empirical experience and only starting to trust his eye.
The architecture I came to admire at Yale arose from a strange
combination of innocence and cynicism: a calculated, knowing, astonishingly
skillful manipulation of historical elements for romantic effect. It was born of
love for an institution and a belief that that love could best be expressed, and
the institution’s future best assured, by replicating the style of the architecture
of great institutions and great places of the past, all the better to connect with
what was so admired. Was this hopelessly naive or devilishly calculating? It
seems, as I look back, to have been some of both. What confidence Yale had
once had in architecture, to believe in its ability to connect to the past, even
to inspire transcendence. What certainty that people would accept the idea of
architecture as a kind of seance, as if it could lift them out of their current
place and time and drop them into another one. And yet of course it was
never so simple as that—the most striking thing of all about the Yale
buildings is the extent to which they were intended not as an escape from the
present but an enrichment of it. Rogers and Yale were not trying to deny the
present; they were deeply proud of the modern technology they used to build
these buildings and of the modernity of the university that these buildings
served.
In the age of modernism’s great ascendancy the Yale buildings had seemed
merely simpleminded and pointless. To people who believed themselves to
have serious architectural taste they were an embarrassment more than a
source of pride. Yet they were clearly better than that, and I worked to learn
why. They were remarkably well crafted and showed nearly flawless
knowledge of proportion, scale, and texture. And they emerged from a
certainty about what an institution wanted itself to be, all qualities that raised
them considerably over most of the modernist buildings that followed them.
A coherent idea, even a somewhat silly one, can lend tremendous power to
the making of a place. And the reality of the Yale buildings, I discovered,
was a great deal less silly than a lot of the thinking behind them. This is the
truly important lesson I learned here: that form and scale and proportion and
texture say far more about the success or failure of buildings than the stylistic
associations we apply to them. Mass, scale, proportion, and texture, not to
mention a building’s relation to its surrounding context, the materials with
which it is built, and the way it is used, all mean much more than style.
Vincent Scully has said that we perceive architecture in two ways—
associatively and empathetically or, in other words, intellectually and
emotionally. We make intellectual associations between buildings and other
buildings, and we feel buildings as emotional presences. Most buildings
affect us both ways, and certainly all great buildings must function in both of
these categories, reminding us of other structures and their forms while also
evoking certain deeper feelings. Superficially the makers of Yale’s Gothic
buildings—and of so many other historicist buildings elsewhere in America,
classical, colonial, Tudor, Spanish, Mediterranean, and what-have-you—
thought of their buildings associatively, for they were clearly reminiscent of
other architecture. But for me the great discovery was that they really worked
best empathetically, for their real ability is to make us feel pleasure and
comfort in their presence.
Plenty of other buildings are important in my memory—Le Corbusier’s
chapel at Ronchamp, which I have visited only once, when I took an all-night
journey to it as a student, looms largest, if only because getting to it was so
much a pilgrimage—but ultimately it is the buildings we live with every day
that do the most to shape our architectural memories. Their influence is not as
dramatic as a visit to a cathedral, and only rarely do they give us the
exhilarating glimpse of possibility that great works can offer. But if we are
lucky, the buildings we live with surround us with a combination of stimulus
and ease, of vibrancy and serenity, and their greatest gifts are conferred
quietly, without our even knowing.

Architectural memory is not always personal, however, and it does not come
only from the buildings we physically visit. Sometimes it is shared, and it
can be shaped by the images of buildings we see in art, in photographs, on
film, and on television. This shared architectural memory sometimes can be
shaped not by an image at all but by words; much of our common cultural
memory of architecture comes from the descriptive passages about buildings
in novels. As for painters, Claude Monet has probably done more than any
photographer, and perhaps more than any architectural historian, to create the
image of Rouen Cathedral for many people; his extraordinary series of
paintings is more powerful in memory than a visit to the cathedral itself. I am
not sure that I would say the same for Canaletto’s great paintings of Venice—
epic though they are, they do not overshadow the reality of the city—but they
surely play a role in establishing a kind of cultural memory, a shared
architectural memory of Venice. Edward Hopper’s paintings of American
places, whether a city street or a storefront or a gas station on a country road,
do much the same thing. For many people, the image of a lighthouse or a
clapboard cottage that they carry in their minds is shaped by Hopper as much
as by buildings they have seen—unless, that is, it is shaped by the
dilapidated farmhouse in Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, which may be
the most replicated building ever painted. Charles Sheeler’s paintings have
had a less dramatic but more meaningful impact on our shared architectural
memory of the American industrial landscape, rendering it powerful and
giving it artistic coherence. The sense most of us have of the great factories
of the Midwest is really Sheeler’s, in the same way that the image most
people have of Salisbury Cathedral is J. M. W. Turner’s.
Photography does the same, only more so. Perhaps the most recognizable
architectural image of the second half of the twentieth century is Julius
Shulman’s photograph of two women, elegantly dressed, sitting in the glass
box of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House No. 22 cantilevered out over the
Hollywood Hills. Here, modern architecture is sexy, it is dramatic, it is
fresh, and it is elegant. It is an image that has come to convey the allure not
only of Los Angeles but of modern architecture itself. But could we not say
the same of Margaret Bourke-White’s celebrated image of the gargoyles atop
the Chrysler Building, in which she herself appears, perched on one of the
gargoyles as she holds her camera? Or Paul Strand’s great photograph of the
side of the J. P. Morgan headquarters on Wall Street, a brilliant composition
that seems to use architecture as a way of explaining all you need to know
about the ice-cold power of capital. And almost every one of Berenice
Abbott’s great photographs of New York in the 1930s, or Atget’s images of
Paris, confers on us more shared architectural memory, this time not only one
of single buildings but also of the way buildings come together to make a
city.

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning

 Buildings enter our memories as characters in films; they are characters in
novels, and they even play a role in cartoons. Would Charles Addams’s
characters have felt quite the same if they had lived in a Cape Cod cottage?
Addams knew that an ornate, Second Empire mansion, at once ramshackle
and grandiose, could seem menacing, even terrifying. He took advantage of
these associations and made them stronger still, so that now, we connect such
houses in memory with his macabre characters. When you hear the phrase
“haunted house,” you picture a house like that, not a suburban split-level.

Julius Shulman, Case Study House #22

Alfred Hitchcock also exploited architectural style to enhance emotional

impact in North by Northwest, but with a very different kind of architecture.
The modern building in the penultimate scene of the movie, a spectacular
house in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, is dramatically cantilevered over a
mountaintop; its very existence suggests tension and improbability. Its
facades are largely of glass, and all that glass suggests transparency, but of
course there is nothing but duplicity within—a lovely tweak at modernism’s
own duplicity, we might say—and the startling space becomes the setting for
a showdown. The stark modernity of the structure, and indeed the fact that it
is itself so visibly a work of structure, underscores a sense of modern
architecture as thrilling, dangerous, and exotic. This scene would not have
been the same had the mountaintop contained a rustic cabin instead of this
modernist extravaganza.
In The Fountainhead, of course, the entire plot turns on architecture.
Modern buildings—at least those of the hero, the vaguely Wrightian Howard
Roark—are presented as noble, bold, and powerful statements of strength
and integrity. Buildings in a more traditional style are weak, insipid copies,
intended to represent nothing but cowardice. I am not sure, despite the
determination of the set designers to make Roark’s buildings seem glorious,
that Ayn Rand’s architectural values imprint themselves on the minds of most
of the film’s viewers—if they had, modern architecture would not still be a
hard sell—but there is no question that this film has played a huge role in
shaping what we might call our culture’s collective architectural memory. So,
too, with such classics as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which more than any other
film created the image of the high-rise city as a place of grim and terrifying
power; King Kong, which confirmed the iconic role of the Empire State
Building (which An Affair to Remember and Sleepless in Seattle, among
other films, extended); Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, which played on the
contrast between the crisp, modernist world of postwar commercial New
York and the intimate, almost cozy space of a private brownstone apartment;
or Ghostbusters, in which the Art Moderne apartment building at 55 Central
Park West becomes, every bit as much as the Addams Family house, a
character in the story. And of course so many of Woody Allen’s films,
Manhattan most of all, make the city’s architecture—or, more to the point,
our romantic image of it—a vivid presence in the action. (In Hannah and
Her Sisters, one of the characters even leads an architectural tour.)
 Still from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest

Still from King Vidor’s The Fountainhead

The cinematic custom of the “establishing shot,” an image of a physical

setting shown at the beginning of a film or television show to establish its
location, often acts simply by itself as a kind of imprint on architectural
memory. The New York skyline is surely as well known from this category of
images as any other—there are, after all, hundreds of New York establishing
shots, from all periods—but the same thing is true of all kinds of buildings
and all kinds of places, whether it is the shots that show us Minneapolis at
the beginning of the old Mary Tyler Moore television show, or those of the
Cheers bar in Boston, or the generically modern, sprawling suburban house
of the Brady Bunch. In each case, the nature of the architecture is no accident:
there is something particular about it that is necessary to allow the story to
move forward.
And this is every bit as true in literature. Washington Square would have
been different in more than title had Henry James located it elsewhere. His
description makes it clear that the house as much as the people within it sets
the tone for the novel:
In Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome,
modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the
drawing-room windows, and a flight of white marble steps
ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble.
This structure, and many of its neighbors, which it exactly
resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last
results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very
solid and honorable dwellings. In front of them was the square,
containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation,
enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and
accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august
precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a
spacious and confident air which already marked it for high
destinies. I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early
associations, but this portion of New York appears to many
persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose
which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long,
shrill city.

In an age before film, passages like this were really the only way in which
architecture could be presented in an extended manner that would go beyond
the single, static image of a painting.
Architecture is vividly present in almost all of the writing of Edith
Wharton, far beyond The Decoration of Houses, the nonfiction work that
was her first full-length book. Wharton’s architectural memories provide
much of the context for many of her stories and novels and thus, in effect,
become a part of our architectural memories, as her readers. Wharton’s
description of the upper Fifth Avenue mansion of Mrs. Manson Mingott in
The Age of Innocence is one of the most memorable passages of architectural
writing in fiction:
[She] put the crowning touch to her audacities by building a large
house of pale cream-coloured stone (when brown sandstone
seemed as much the only wear as a frock-coat in the afternoon) in
an inaccessible wilderness near the Central Park…. The cream-
coloured house (supposed to be modelled on the private hotels of
the Parisian aristocracy) was there as a visible proof of her moral
courage; and she throned in it, among pre-Revolutionary furniture
and souvenirs of the Tuileries of Louis Napoleon (where she had
shone in her middle age), as placidly as if there were nothing
peculiar in living above Thirty-fourth Street, or in having French
windows that opened like doors instead of sashes that pulled
up….
The burden of Mrs. Manson Mingott’s flesh had long since
made it impossible for her to go up and down stairs, and with
characteristic independence she had made her reception rooms
upstairs and established herself (in flagrant violation of all the
New York proprieties) on the ground floor of her house; so that, as
you sat in her sitting-room window with her, you caught (through a
door that was always open, and a looped-back damask portière)
the unexpected vista of a bedroom with a huge low bed
upholstered like a sofa, and a toilet-table with frivolous lace
flounces and a gilt-framed mirror.
Her visitors were startled and fascinated by the foreignness of
this arrangement, which recalled scenes in French fiction, and
architectural incentives to immorality such as the simple American
had never dreamed of. That was how women with lovers lived in
the wicked old societies, in apartments with all the rooms on one
floor, and all the indecent propinquities that their novels
described.

Wharton describes another building that plays an important role in the story,
an aloof country house on the Hudson River, this way:
 People had always been told that the house at Skuytercliff was an
Italian villa. Those who had never been to Italy believed it; so did
some who had…. It was a large square wooden structure, with
tongued and grooved walls painted pale green and white, a
Corinthian portico, and fluted pilasters between the windows.
From the high ground on which it stood a series of terraces
bordered by balustrades and urns descended in the steel-engraving
style to a small irregular lake with an asphalt edge overhung by
rare weeping conifers….
Against the uniform sheet of snow and the greyish winter sky
the Italian villa loomed up rather grimly; even in summer it kept its
distance, and the boldest coleus bed never ventured nearer than
thirty feet from its awful front. Now, as Archer rang the bell, the
long tinkle seemed to echo through a mausoleum; and the surprise
of the butler who at length responded to the call was as great as
though he had been summoned from his final sleep.

It is difficult not to think that for Wharton, architecture is destiny. She makes
clear not only the connection between architectural form and social status but
also the extent to which architecture can function, not merely as a static
backdrop, but almost as an active force in the shaping, not to say the limiting,
of a life:
He knew that Mr. Welland … already had his eye on a newly built
house in East Thirty-ninth Street. The neighborhood was thought
remote, and the house was built in a ghastly greenish-yellow stone
that the younger architects were beginning to employ as a protest
against the brownstone of which the uniform hue coated New York
like a cold chocolate sauce; but the plumbing was perfect…. The
young man felt that his fate was sealed: for the rest of his life he
would go up every evening between the cast-iron railings of that
greenish-yellow doorstep, and pass through a Pompeian vestibule
into a hall with a wainscoting of varnished yellow wood.

Perhaps the most telling, if oblique, architectural phrase of all in The Age of
Innocence, however, is the brief line in which New-land Archer, the
protagonist, speaks of how the character of people can often be hard to
discern, but buildings tell you clearly what they are. “Everything must be
labeled—but everybody is not,” Archer says. Architecture reveals the
intentions of its builders.
As with films, there is no end to the extent to which architecture plays an
active role in literature and to the way in which writers’ architectural
memories begin to shape our own. “In 1902 Father built a house at the crest
of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York,” is how E. L.
Doctorow opens Ragtime. “It was a three-story brown shingle with dormers,
bay windows and a screened porch. Striped awnings shaded the windows.
The family took possession of this stout manse on a sunny day in June and it
seemed for some years thereafter that all their days would be warm and
fair”—architecture setting a tone altogether opposite, you might say, from that
of Edith Wharton or, for that matter, Charles Addams.
John Knowles opened his staple of high school English reading lists, A
Separate Peace, with a description of a New England prep school that was
far more engaging and illuminating than the novel’s plot:
I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking
oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before.
It seemed more sedate than I remembered it, more perpendicular
and strait-laced, with narrower windows and shinier woodwork,
as though a coat of varnish had been put over everything for better
preservation….
I didn’t entirely like this glossy new surface, because it made
the school look like a museum, and that’s exactly what it was to
me, and what I did not want it to be. In the deep, tacit way in
which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that
the Devon School came into existence the day I entered it, was
vibrantly real while I was a student there, and then blinked out like
a candle the day I left.
Now here it was after all, preserved by some considerate hand
with varnish and wax….
I walked along Gilman Street, the best street in town. The
houses were as handsome and as unusual as I remembered. Clever
modernizations of old Colonial manses, extensions in Victorian
wood, capacious Greek Revival temples lined the street, as
impressive and just as forbidding as ever. I had rarely seen anyone
go into one of them, or anyone playing on a lawn, or even an open
 window. Today with their failing ivy and stripped, moaning trees,
the houses looked both more elegant and more lifeless than ever.
Like all old, good schools, Devon did not stand isolated behind
walls and gates but emerged naturally from the town which had
produced it. So there was no sudden moment of encounter as I
approached it; the houses along Gilman Street began to look more
defensive, which meant that I was near the school, and then more
exhausted, which meant that I was in it.

In W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, architectural memory is, as much as

anything, the novel’s theme. The book is full of remarkable passages of
description—it is almost a continuous flow of images of place, and it begins
with a scene in which the narrator comes upon a backpacker named
Austerlitz in the waiting room of the train station in Antwerp “making notes
and sketches obviously relating to the room where we were both sitting—a
magnificent hall more suitable, to my mind, for a state ceremony than as a
place to wait for the next connection to Paris or Oostende—for when he was
not actually writing something down his glance often dwelt on the row of
windows, the fluted pilasters, and other structural details of the waiting
room.” Sebald goes on:
When I finally went over to Austerlitz with a question about his
obvious interest in the waiting room, he was not at all surprised by
my direct approach but answered me at once, without the slightest
hesitation, as I have variously found since that solitary travelers,
who so often pass days on end in uninterrupted silence, are glad to
be spoken to…. Our Antwerp conversations, as he sometimes
called them later, turned primarily on architectural history, in
accordance with his own astonishing professional expertise, and it
was the subject we discussed that evening as we sat together until
nearly midnight in the restaurant facing the waiting room on the
other side of the great domed hall. The few guests still lingering at
that late hour one by one deserted the buffet, which was
constructed like a mirror image of the waiting room, until we were
left alone with a solitary man drinking Fernet and the barmaid,
who sat enthroned on a stool behind the counter, legs crossed,
filing her nails with complete devotion and concentration.
Austerlitz commented in passing of this lady, whose peroxide-
blond hair was piled up into a sort of bird’s nest, that she was the
goddess of time past. And on the wall behind her, under the lion
crest of the kingdom of Belgium, there was indeed a mighty clock,
the dominating feature of the buffet, with a hand some six feet long
traveling round a dial which had once been gilded, but was now
blackened by railway soot and tobacco smoke…. Towards the end
of the nineteenth century, Austerlitz began, in reply to my question
about the history of the building of the Antwerp station, when
Belgium, a little patch of yellowish gray barely visible on the map
of the world, spread its sphere of influence to the African
continent with its colonial enterprises…. It was the personal wish
of King Leopold, under whose auspices such apparently
inexorable progress was being made, that the money suddenly and
abundantly available should be used to erect public buildings
which would bring international renown to his aspiring state. One
of the projects thus initiated by the highest authority in the land
was the central station of the Flemish metropolis, where we are
sitting now, said Austerlitz; designed by Louis Delacenserie, it
was inaugurated in the summer of 1905, after ten years of planning
and building, in the presence of the King himself. The model
Leopold had recommended to his architect was the new railway
station of Lucerne, where he had been particularly struck by the
concept of the dome, so dramatically exceeding the usual modest
height of railway buildings, a concept realized by Delacenserie in
his own design, which was inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, in
such stupendous fashion that even today, said Austerlitz, exactly as
the architect intended when we step into the entrance hall we are
seized by a sense of being beyond the profane, in a cathedral
consecrated to international traffic and trade. Delacenserie
borrowed the main elements of his monumental structure from the
palaces of the Italian Renaissance, but he also struck Byzantine
and Moorish notes, and perhaps when I arrived, said Austerlitz, I
myself had noticed the round gray and white granite turrets, the
sole purpose of which was to arouse medieval associations in the
minds of railway passengers.
And finally, another great observer of place, the novelist Alison Lurie,
describes a young couple’s arrival in Los Angeles in The Nowhere City:
All the houses on the street were made of stucco in ice-cream
colours: vanilla, lemon, raspberry, and orange sherbet. Moulded
in a variety of shapes and set down one next to the other along the
block, behind plots of flowers much larger and brighter than life,
they looked like the stage set for some lavish comic opera….
But Katherine refused to be pleased. She wouldn’t even open
her eyes to see this warm, bright, extraordinary city. She behaved
as if he had deliberately set out to make her unhappy by coming
here—as if his professional career had nothing to do with it.
… A dozen architectural styles were represented in painted
stucco: there were little Spanish haciendas with red tiled roofs;
English country cottages, all beams and mullioned windows; a
pink Swiss chalet; and even a tiny French chateau, the pointed
towers of which seemed to be made of pistachio ice cream.
The energy of all this invention both amused and delighted
Paul. Back East, only the very rich dared to build with such
variety: castles on the Hudson, Greek temples in the south.
Everyone else had to live on streets of nearly identical brick or
wooden boxes, like so many boxes of soap and sardines. Why
shouldn’t people build their houses in the shape of pagodas, their
grocery stores in the shape of Turkish baths, and their restaurants
like boats and hats, if they wanted to? Let them build, and tear
down and build again; let them experiment. Anyone who can only
see that some of the experiments are “vulgar” should look into the
derivation of that word. He liked to think of this city as the last
American frontier.

In The Nowhere City, architecture again becomes vastly more than

background, more even than background elegantly described. It defines
sensibility and becomes a metaphor for issues in a marriage. We quickly see
that Katherine has one set of architectural memories and Paul another; and
while their architectural memories could seem compatible in the environment
of the East Coast, their differences move into high relief against the backdrop
of Los Angeles. Lurie’s view of Los Angeles as a loose, vaguely funky
environment of exuberant popular culture is, in its way, as outdated now as
Edith Wharton’s view of New York, but that in no way diminishes its literary
strength. In Wharton and Lurie, as in James, Sebald, and so many other
writers, painters, photographers, and filmmakers, architecture strikes a
powerful emotional chord that plays a significant role in shaping a work of
art—and that, in turn, creates an entirely new dimension of architectural
memory for us all.
6
buildings and time
I suppose that all architecture has to die before it can touch the
historical imagination.
SIR JOHN SUMMERSON, The Unromantic Castle
In a city, time becomes visible.
LEWIS MUMFORD

Because we live with buildings, and see them all the time, our relationship to
them is at once more intimate and more distant than our relationship to music
or painting or literature or film, things that we experience episodically but
intensely. When you are watching a film, your world consists almost entirely
of what you see on the screen; when you are in a building, only occasionally
do other perceptions and other thoughts disappear from your mind. I spoke in
chapter 2 about the extent to which architecture, even good architecture, can
encourage complacency; because we see it every day, as a backdrop to our
lives, it is easy to stop seeing it with fresh eyes, however closely we interact
with it. The complacency that time induces has a purpose: it lets us tolerate
things that would be intolerable if we continued to feel them intensely. Thus
you numb yourself to that awful shopping mall on the way to work, or you no
longer grit your teeth when you see the ugly new storefront that replaced the
beloved old soda fountain on Main Street. But such tolerance comes at a
price—there is a high tariff to the comfort of familiarity, for it encourages us
to stop seeing.
Our relationship to almost every building changes over time, and for all
kinds of reasons. A building that seemed large and imposing when you were
a child—say, your elementary school—can seem small and ordinary when
you return to it later in life. A building that held no interest whatsoever—
perhaps a church or a hospital or an office tower—can seem vastly more
significant, and perhaps even more attractive, if your life begins to intersect
with it in a new way. Buildings that seem striking, shocking, bizarre, or
merely different when new become more and more familiar over time, and
you can move in your view of them from surprised irritation to acceptance,
and sometimes even beyond that to admiration or joy. Like many people I
first thought the buildings of Morris Lapidus, the architect famous for his
glitzy Miami Beach hotels like the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc, and the
Americana, to be silly, even vulgar. In time, I think I began to see architecture
in a less puritanical way and came to find them entertaining, and perhaps
even more than that. Lapidus was not a great architect, but he was a very
good one, and behind his panache was serious architectural skill, set off by
wit.
So the first reason that buildings change over time is that we change. None
of us is constant; we see the world at least a little bit differently every day,
and changes in your feelings about almost anything can play out in the
attitudes you have toward the architecture you see. You can become more
sophisticated, you can become more impatient; you can become more
desirous of privacy and quiet; you can become more stimulated by excitement
and grandeur. A single building—whether a cathedral or a house—can
sometimes affect you so profoundly that it changes your attitude toward all
the architecture you see.
Then, of course, buildings themselves change. They are altered or
expanded or repainted or given cute red shutters or whole new facades of
glass, or they get new next-door neighbors that clash with them or lose
neighbors that don’t. When a skyscraper goes up next to a brownstone row
house, the row house no longer looks the same, even if not a stone in it has
been touched. Our relationship to these buildings is no longer the same
because in some meaningful way the buildings themselves are no longer the
same.
More important than either one of these ways of changing how we see
buildings is a third kind of change, which is when the culture changes, when
we begin to see buildings in a different milieu—when times have changed,
we might say. This is the hardest kind of change to understand, but it is in
many ways the most consequential and surely the most complex. Every
building exists within a social and cultural context, and receives much of its
meaning from it, and that backdrop is not static, either. Indeed, the culture
within which you see a building is likely to change more often, and more
completely, than your own eye ever will.
My own experience with the towers of the World Trade Center in New
York went through several clear and very distinct stages, though to be sure it
never reached the stage of admiration. It began with a phase that would be
much better characterized as Resentment: what, I wondered, was this thing,
or this pair of things, doing in the middle of Manhattan, so big, so banal, so
unthinkably intrusive, all the more insulting because it is taking away the title
of tallest building that I, like so many New Yorkers, believed rightfully
belonged to the Empire State Building. Over the years that evolved into a
second phase, which I could call Acceptance, or perhaps Grudging
Acceptance, coming from, first, a recognition that we do, after all, get used to
anything and that in the case of architecture we had better get used to it,
because unlike a work of art or literature or music that we don’t like, we may
well see a work of architecture every day. Some other factors heightened my
acceptance of the twin towers and made it somewhat more than just a matter
of getting used to them. First, I came to recognize that these buildings did
have a certain value as minimalist sculpture. The boxy forms played off well
against each other, since one of the few things the architect Minoru Yamasaki
did was to place them correctly vis-à-vis one another, not side by side but
with the corners almost but not exactly touching. And their facades were
largely of metal, not glass, and that meant that they did wonderful things in
the light; they reflected the warm sunlight of dawn and dusk especially well,
but at all times they shimmered, and their texture gave them a richness that
people did come to value.
The twin towers had a weird mix of delicacy and bombast, and they
tended to appear fragile and overbearing at the same time, admittedly a
strange combination of qualities in a single building. Since they were the
tallest things around, they also functioned as a kind of campanile, an
enormous bell tower, two bell towers actually, in Lower Manhattan, and I
came to value them for this as well. The towers became a kind of orienting
device, which integrated them into the daily life of the city and made them
more benign.
But nothing in this Acceptance phase reached the level of Admiration, at
least not for me: the architecture was still too big, too dumb, too indifferent
to the needs of the urban context of Lower Manhattan. Of course all of these
views became altogether irrelevant when the extraordinary and horrific
events of September 11, 2001, occurred, and conventional issues of
architectural criticism were rendered moot. My feelings about the World
Trade Center and just about everyone else’s all became the same: the
buildings became our first skyscraper martyrs. That evolving feelings about a
building could culminate in this—a final phase, of architectural martyrdom—
could not ever, of course, have been imagined, and it is surely like no other
course of feelings about any building. We are not accustomed to thinking of
any buildings as martyrs, but the World Trade Center is now inexplicably
bound up in a whole set of other values that martyrdom embraces—if you
doubt it, think of how, as I said in chapter 2, sidewalk vendors all over New
York were selling pictures of the twin towers for years after September 11,
the way they used to sell pictures of Malcolm X or John F. Kennedy. (These
tragic events put this building, so little respected by architectural historians
and critics during its lifetime, essentially out of the range of normal
architectural criticism. Martyrs, after all, are beyond criticism. Joan of Arc
was not a very nice woman, but you will not hear anyone ever say that. And
few people dare to say anymore that the World Trade Center was not a very
nice building.)

Minoru Yamasaki, World Trade Center towers, New York

The towers of the World Trade Center symbolized modernity, both to the
tourists who flocked to them and to the terrorists who attacked them. The fact
that their symbolic power came more from vast size than architectural quality
is beside the point. Paradoxically, the towers represented an ideal of
modernity that seemed to communicate most effectively to people who were
not particularly interested in modernity, if not outright hostile to it. Their
hugeness and simplicity made them almost a cartoon version of gargantuan
modern architecture—and as such, all the more attractive to tourists, who
took pleasure in riding to the top of the buildings, and all the more pernicious
to those who saw in them all of the evils of modern culture.
This is not the place in which to talk at length about society’s complex and
often contradictory attitudes toward modernism, which could be a book in
itself. But it would be useful to say a word here about another important
modernist building, less well known than the World Trade Center but far
superior as a work of architecture, that was hailed when it was completed,
fell almost immediately into disfavor, and eventually was restored to its role
as a major architectural monument. The building is the Art and Architecture
Building at Yale University, designed by Paul Rudolph and completed in
1963. It is a heavy structure of rough concrete and glass, arranged into a
strong composition almost perfectly balanced between vertical and
horizontal and solid and void. Most of the building’s solid walls are made of
a rough concrete that has been set in alternately smooth and rough striations
so that it looks almost like corduroy. It is a building that has strong echoes of
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building of 1904, his monumental office
building in Buffalo, quite heartlessly demolished more than half a century
ago. But it also owes a debt to Le Corbusier’s monastery at Latourette,
France, of 1955, the building that is generally acknowledged to have been the
first masterwork of the tough, raw style that became known as Brutalism. One
writer referred to Rudolph’s building as looking like a train crash between
Wright and Le Corbusier, though it could more kindly be described as a
remarkable synthesis of influences from two very different modernist
predecessors. It is a difficult building, but an exceptionally powerful and
beautifully composed one, and it is easy to see how in the early 1960s, as
glass boxes were beginning to feel all too common, Rudolph seemed to be
showing a way toward a new kind of modern architecture, one that absorbed
influences from its modernist forebears and used them to push architecture
forward.
What the Art and Architecture Building was not was what you would call
user-friendly. The building’s harshness, which extended to its multistoried
open spaces, covered in bright orange carpeting and lit with bare bulbs, left
many people uncomfortable. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner was invited to give the
dedication speech, and he left no doubt that he did not approve of the
building he was dedicating: to him, it was an affectation, a sculptural
indulgence instead of the austere modernism Pevsner favored. Taking note of
the fact that Paul Rudolph was the chairman of the Yale architecture
department, Pevsner told the audience it was essential to remember that the
client was the architect, and the architect was the client—in other words, if
you don’t like it, there is only one person to blame. Less than two years later
Rudolph resigned and was replaced by Charles Moore, an architect whose
work was lighthearted and playful, altogether different in tone. The first
stirrings of postmodernism, an architectural style that sought to move beyond
modernism by integrating elements from historical architectural styles, were
in the air, and Moore was a major proponent of it. He made no secret of the
fact that the building he had inherited was not his idea of what a school of
architecture, or any other building for that matter, should look like, and he
encouraged unsympathetic renovations. In 1969 the building was damaged by
fire, and the repairs that followed changed it further. By the 1970s, Rudolph’s
design had been significantly altered, and not for the better.

Paul Rudolph, exterior view, Art and Architecture Building (now Paul
Rudolph Hall), left; at right, addition by Charles Gwathmey and Robert
Siegel, Jeffrey Loria Hall, Yale University, New Haven

By the 1980s, when the building entered its third decade, it was
grudgingly tolerated as a battle-scared relic of an age of heroic modernism
that was felt to be long gone. But the next twenty years would show at least
as much of a swing of the pendulum as the previous twenty. Postmodernism
sputtered, and the spate of historical revivals that emerged in its wake was
beginning to seem less convincing, or at least boringly familiar. More
architects, particularly younger ones, were coming to feel a renewed interest
in modernist architecture, which, after all, was increasingly becoming a
historical style itself. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, much of the
most important architecture being designed was by architects who identified
themselves as modernists. They wanted to invent new things in the modernist
vocabulary, not to copy the work of a previous generation, and to them, the
carefully composed abstractions of Rudolph’s building looked not
overbearing but appealing, even inspiring. In 2008 Yale restored the building
to its original appearance, even down to reproducing the original orange
carpeting, renamed it Paul Rudolph Hall, and added a new wing designed by
one of Rudolph’s best-known students, Charles Gwathmey.
What does it all prove? The saga of Paul Rudolph’s building at Yale
means more, I think, than the notion that everything that is old becomes new
again. It tells us also, as the British architectural historian Sir John
Summerson pointed out, that architecture almost always has to fall into
disfavor before it can be appreciated on the scale of history. A building can
attract all the attention in the world when it is new, as Rudolph’s did—it was
the equivalent in its day of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in
ours—but that proves only that it is capable of creating a certain level of
excitement. It is new and different, visually compelling and full of ideas
worth talking about. And talking about it becomes, in a sense, the latest
fashion, which doesn’t mean the building isn’t capable of being more than
this season’s trendy event. It just means we can’t know for a while. Fashion
is what happens in the short run. Art is more of a proposition for the long run.
Only after a building has emerged from the hoopla that surrounds its
emergence as an object of fashion can we see if it has the qualities that will
give it lasting importance. And almost inevitably what comes after a debut
that defines a building as fashionable is for it to become unfashionable.
There is almost always a reaction against adoration, even if only temporary.
This is true not only for buildings but for entire careers. The reputation of
Frank Lloyd Wright, the most important architect the United States has ever
produced, was at a low point for a generation after his death in 1959; it took
at least twenty years for architects and historians to feel enough distance
from Wright to look at him objectively. Today there is more Wright
scholarship than ever, but there was relatively little attention paid to him in
the years after his death. It took well into the twentieth century for Sir John
Soane, who died in 1837, to be recognized as one of the greatest English
architects of all time. (Soane, proud and cantankerous, did not leave behind a
huge cadre of warm admirers, which surely didn’t help.) And in our own
time there was a significant reaction against Michael Graves, who in the
early 1980s produced a series of buildings in a highly personal style that you
might call a hybrid of classicism and Cubism. In the early years of
postmodernism, Graves was all the rage—not only did his buildings get lots
of attention, Graves himself became one of the first celebrity architects. Then
fashion moved on, and Graves didn’t. Graves, like Paul Rudolph a
generation before him, has stuck to his guns, and continues to produce work
in the style that made him famous, because, also like Rudolph, he believes in
it. There may well be a Graves revival as there has been a Rudolph one.

To say that it takes time to determine the significance of a work of

architecture—that time will tell, as it were—is not to say that great works do
not bear the mark of their time, that they are “timeless.” Nothing is timeless.
Everything tells us something about the age in which it was made and in some
way signals us as to what that age was. One of the things that characterizes
great or even very good architecture is that it has meaning that lasts far
beyond its time, but that is not the same as saying that it transcends its time. It
may have qualities that transcend the immediacy of its moment, and it may
communicate eloquently to people living in different times from the one in
which it was created. Indeed, it has to do that if it is going to be more than
fashion. But that hardly denies the fact that every work of architecture, from
the most ordinary to the most transcendent, has roots in a particular time.
As the modern movement was developing in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, its staunchest polemicists, such as Le Corbusier, made
much of the idea that there was a “style for the time,” as we saw in chapter 1.
The argument was that you could make architecture either in the true way that
was faithful to the concerns of the moment or in the false way that was not.
To build in the wrong way was to do what the nineteenth century did, which
was to make architecture that resembled some style of the past—Gothic,
classical, Romanesque, Italian Renaissance, Georgian, and so forth. To build
in the right way was to be inspired by the age of the machine and to turn
away from the historical styles that to the modernists were just so much
clutter. There was a lot of rhetoric about a new age needing a new
architecture. (In Frank Lloyd Wright’s American locution, it was American
democracy needing a new architecture.)
 But things were never so simple, in part because you can never measure a
time solely by what its avant-garde is thinking and doing. Modernism created
extraordinary works, but it did not have sole possession of the early
twentieth century. As we look back at the architecture that was produced in
the years before World War I, there is no greater representation of that time
than, say, Carrère and Hastings’s New York Public Library, or Warren and
Wetmore’s Grand Central Terminal, or James Gamble Rogers’s Memorial
Quadrangle on the Yale campus, or Charles McKim’s Pennsylvania Station,
or Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building. These are all traditional buildings—
some Gothic, some classical, but every one of them heavily reliant on
historical style rather the modernist architecture that, by the 1910s, was
already becoming a part of the culture. And yet today we think of them as
being totally representative of their time, and they are. James Gamble
Rogers’s Gothic-style buildings at Yale were no more truly of the Middle
Ages than Charles McKim’s Pennsylvania Station was truly of the Roman
period. They were buildings of the early twentieth century, and they represent
that time to us now as well and as fully as any work of modernism.
 Cass Gilbert, Woolworth Building, New York

Today we realize that modernism did not have sole possession of the right
to define the time, as it claimed. That is really the point, that the defining
architecture of the early twentieth century was not only that which was
dramatically and powerfully different; that period could also be defined, as
can ours, by architecture that is heavily and unambiguously reliant on
historical style. If buildings like the great structures I mentioned a moment
ago truly didn’t represent their time, they would not have the iconic status
that they do for us today. We would think of them, if we thought of them at all,
as irrelevant throwbacks, as leftovers produced by recalcitrant architects
who didn’t get with the program, as buildings that hardly mattered now.
Of course that isn’t the case. Buildings like the Woolworth Building and
Grand Central Terminal and Harkness Tower at Yale—and thousands more
like them—are their time, and they still define it, with brilliance and power.
The moralistic argument—that the only way to be true to one’s time is to
create something completely new and different from what has come before—
is one of those axioms that sound impressive when you first hear them but
turn out not to mean very much once you try to probe them deeply.
The belief that there was indeed a style for the time, and that it was
inherently superior to the reuse of a style from a previous time, affected the
reception that one of the greatest museum buildings of the twentieth century,
the National Gallery of Art in Washington, by John Russell Pope, received
when it opened in 1941. By then, the building of the Museum of Modern Art
in Midtown Manhattan was already two years old. While modern
architecture had not yet become the accepted standard for public buildings,
by 1941 it was far beyond seeming strange, radical, and new. The decision to
design the National Gallery in a classical style struck many people as
consciously and deliberately rearguard, which indeed it was. Yet Pope’s
building is one of the most inviting, elegant, and functional art museums ever
built, with sumptuous galleries arrayed in a straight line extending from
either side of a grand marble rotunda. The building is huge, but its
organization is clear and straightforward; unlike in most traditional art
museums, it is impossible to get lost in the National Gallery. The galleries
are larger than the rooms in a house, but not so big that they feel institutional,
and every one of them is lit by natural light from above. The detailing is cool
and precise, almost severe; the opulence is always tempered by reserve.
Pope had the rare ability to design buildings that were large and grand but
not overbearing; for all its formality and dignity, nothing about this building
is pompous. You sense that Pope was using classicism as a source of dignity
and that he was distilling it down to its essence. That is the real brilliance of
the National Gallery: it is classicism distilled to a pure, powerful, and spare,
and everything within it is designed to show the paintings to their best
advantage.

John Russell Pope, exterior view, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

In this sense it worked far better than many modern museums, a fact that
was not seen, or at least not acknowledged, by the critics of the building,
who dismissed it as tired and fuddy-duddy, a sign that the United States could
look only backward in its public buildings, not forward. The designers of the
National Gallery were indeed looking backward, but it mattered less than
people thought, since the quality of the building was so extraordinary that it
transcended style. The building was so strong in its architectural
fundamentals—in its scale, in its materials, in its organization, in its details,
and above all in how it served the needs of both the paintings in the
collection and the people who came to see them—that the rear-guard nature
of its classical garb could be said, in one sense, to have been almost beside
the point.
Indeed, the Pope building is considerably more honest, in some ways, than
its modern addition, the East Building of the National Gallery by I. M. Pei,
completed in 1978. Pei’s building is a powerful composition of diagonals,
built out of the same Tennessee marble as the original National Gallery
beside it, but almost nothing else is the same about the two buildings. The
sharp diagonals say “modern” as clearly as Pope’s columns said “classical”;
they are every bit as powerful an architectural signal. But as for honesty and
clarity, those supposed modernist virtues, they are largely absent in the Pei
building, which becomes somewhat confusing to understand and navigate
your way around once you get past its spectacular, skylit atrium. The atrium
is a splendid civic space, but the galleries, instead of flowing majestically
out of the central space as they do from Pope’s rotunda, are largely huge loft
spaces set in differing points around the building, and which need to be
designed anew for each installation. There is no sense that the specific
demands of displaying art were the driving force in determining the design,
as they were for John Russell Pope. So which is more “functional”—the
classical portion of the National Gallery or the modernist one?
Modernist theorists have tried to make the argument that to build in the
latest style is to be true to one’s time, and to build in a style that resembles
the architecture of the past is false—a betrayal of one’s time, you could
almost say. But it has never been that simple. Styles are languages, and
languages continue to change and evolve. English today is different from the
language of Shakespeare’s time or even George Bernard Shaw’s. The
greatest architects who have worked in past styles, architects from Thomas
Jefferson to Sir Edwin Lutyens to Léon Krier and Jaquelin Robertson, see
historical architecture as a chance to say new things in an existing language,
not merely to copy what has been said before.

I. M. Pei, exterior view, National Gallery of Art East Building, Washington,

D.C.
 If I can make the issue even more complicated, by the time the East
Building went up in the late 1970s, modernism was beginning to take on a
different connotation in our culture, since it was coming itself to be a part of
history. Since many of the most important modern buildings had been
constructed in the 1920s or before, by the 1970s many of the buildings by the
early modern masters such as Wright and Le Corbusier and Mies van der
Rohe were more than half a century old. Modernism was a mature,
established style, not quite as established as the classicism John Russell
Pope had used, but after a generation of modernist corporate headquarters
and office towers and public buildings, you could hardly call it the daring
and radical style it once had been. (You could almost say that by 1978, Pei
was in some ways being just as conservative as Pope.)
And since then, modernism has receded still farther into history. In the
twenty-first century, when an architect like Robert A. M. Stern designs a
mansion in the Georgian style or a country house in the manner of the
nineteenth-century Shingle Style, does it mean something all that different
from what it means when an architect like Charles Gwathmey chooses to
create a large and sumptuous modernist house inspired by the work of Le
Corbusier? The architects themselves may feel it is quite different, but I’m
not sure that we need to agree with them. Each architect is inspired by
something he has admired from the past to design something new in the
present that does not precisely resemble anything that has been built before.
Each is being inventive within a particular design vocabulary, and the fact
that the Georgian mansion traces its ancestry back to one century and the
modernist villa to another may not mean all that much to us, in the end.
Today, both look back. And our time, like every other, gets to reinterpret the
historical languages of architecture on its own terms.

But since the era does matter, what is it, then, that defines a time? Why is
Delano and Aldrich’s Knickerbocker Club on Fifth Avenue in New York,
which is one of the most beautiful Georgian-style buildings ever created, still
a building of the twentieth century and not of the eighteenth, which its
architects clearly wanted it to resemble? What makes the sprawling Houses
of Parliament a Gothic building of the nineteenth century and not one of the
sixteenth? Some of the answer lies in the technology of building materials—
large buildings of the twentieth century are almost always built on steel or
reinforced concrete skeletons, whatever stylistic surface is applied to them.
The Gothic elements in Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building, finished in 1913,
were so striking that a prominent rector dubbed the tower “The Cathedral of
Commerce.” But underneath all of Gilbert’s terra-cotta Gothic ornament was
a fully modern skyscraper. The same can be said of McKim, Mead and
White’s old building for Tiffany and Company on Fifth Avenue in New York,
of 1906, which was inspired by the Palazzo Grimani in Venice. But the
building hardly resembled a sixteenth-century Venetian palace on the inside.
Like the new Shingle Style house that is designed to look like a mansion from
1902 but has a huge, eat-in family kitchen and a media room, the interior
almost always reveals the time.
But there is something else, more subtle perhaps, that marks buildings like
these as being of the twentieth century and reveals them as contemporaries of
the modernist architecture that was created in the hope of making them go
away. Most late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century buildings in
historical styles have a certain softness and picturesqueness about them, as if
their architects were interested in visual ease above all. They lack the
toughness of the truly new. They are stage sets—wonderful stage sets to be
sure, but rarely do they have the ability to do more than give us visual
pleasure. In those years it was the modern buildings that had the awkward
brilliance of the new.
What I mean to say is that there really is a zeitgeist, a spirit of the time; it
is just not so narrow as Le Corbusier or Walter Gropius would have had us
believe, and not so limited to the cutting edge. Every age has its sensibility,
and architecture inevitably both reflects and reveals it: the grandiose
classical buildings of the City Beautiful movement at the end of the nineteenth
century went hand in hand with the growing imperial ambitions of the United
States, just as the acceptance of modernist architecture by the corporate
world after World War II was a natural expression of the widely held belief
that a new postwar era was beginning, with America’s economic growth at
its center. Within all of these large trends, of course, are smaller, briefer
fashions. People tend to want buildings that look like other buildings, just so
long as they are not identical, just as they like to dress almost, but not quite,
the way other people dress. When an architect produces an appealing
variation on a common style, it often spreads as any fashion does.
I have come to believe that time means at least as much as place, and often
more, in determining what kind of architecture gets built almost anywhere
that is not cut off from other places. Gothic architecture reached its most
glorious heights in France, but it was hardly limited to France, just as the
return to classicism represented by the Renaissance, for all we think of it as
being centered in Italy, manifested itself in much of Europe. In our own time,
think of how the commercial districts of almost every American city in the
late nineteenth century contained buildings of dark stone or red brick in
vaguely Romanesque style, with elaborate arches and cornices—buildings
that owed a debt to the great architecture of both Henry Hobson Richardson
and Frank Furness and could be found in Boston and Dallas and Denver and
Minneapolis and New York and San Francisco. The same thing could be said
of skyscraper designs from the 1920s or suburban colonial-style villas or
postwar glass office towers. In each case, the time marks the buildings far
more than the place. (We might say the same about the form of cities. San
Francisco and Los Angeles are both in California, but they could not be more
different, less because of their geography than because San Francisco is a
city of the nineteenth century and Los Angeles a city of the twentieth.)
Technology also plays an enormous role in determining the architecture of
an era. People have always built what technology allowed them to build,
whether it was the columns of Greek architecture, the arches and viaducts of
Roman architecture, the flying buttresses that supported Gothic cathedrals,
the high domes of the Renaissance, or the steel frames that made the first
skyscrapers possible. The Metropolitan Life Tower in New York, which was
the tallest building in the world from its completion in 1909 until the
Woolworth Building was finished four years later, is a close copy of the
campanile of St. Mark’s in Venice. But it is vastly bigger, and it is not hard to
tell that there is a modern skyscraper underneath that fancy garb, just as there
is under the Gothic tracery of the Woolworth Building. Pushing technology to
the limits defines the swooping concrete forms Eero Saarinen designed in the
late 1950s, such as the TWA Terminal at Kennedy Airport and the Ingalls
Hockey Rink at Yale, both of which seem primitive beside the more
flamboyant and sculptural buildings produced some forty years later by Frank
Gehry. Gehry buildings like the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao or the Walt
Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, which could not have been produced
without the aid of computers, carry the invention of form far beyond what
Saarinen and others could do a generation ago. More recently still, the
computer has given us a whole genre of buildings known as “blob
architecture,” with strange, amoebalike shapes that clearly reflect the
computerized origin of their designs. Not all architecture reflects technology
in its form, as we have seen. But almost all of it takes advantage of it in its
innards. As technology advances, architecture responds to the potential it
offers, as it has since the beginning of building.

Buildings relate to the issue of time in another way, and that is in how, as
Lewis Mumford said, they make time itself visible. A city resonates with the
layers of time it reveals through its buildings. There is something off-putting
about a place that is entirely new. It may excite you for a moment, but you
rapidly sense the absence of history. There is novelty to Las Vegas or to the
Pudong section of Shanghai, but it wears off quickly, since it all feels like a
surface. A city—or a town or a village—should feel as if it began long
before you and will go on long after you. It should have a patina. It should
have gravitas, which older buildings confer naturally, especially if they are
good ones. Older buildings give a place an anchor in time. It should almost
go without saying that preserving old buildings is the right thing to do.
But how many of them should we be saving, and where? If preservation of
older architecture is the goal, how does this not conflict with the fact that real
places are not static? Colonial Williamsburg is one thing, but real cities are
not museums. They grow and change. They have to grow and change; if they
do not, they are dead. Period. If a city preserves everything, no matter how
good its architecture is, keeping new life flowing through its veins becomes
much more difficult, all the more because Americans have a tendency to
preserve important buildings as if they were fragile hothouse orchids,
wanting them to look pristine and perfect and show no sign of the passage of
time. European cities have often done better than American ones at this, in
part because Europeans are much more relaxed about their old buildings—
they do have so many of them, after all—and they are less inclined to think of
them as artifacts that must be handled with kid gloves. The conversion of the
spectacular Gare d’Orsay in Paris into the Louvre’s wing for nineteenth-
century art and the creation of the Tate Modern out of a vast power station on
the South Bank in London may not have resulted in the most perfect of
museums, but both projects make the point that great older buildings can take
some pushing and pulling and can in fact be enriched by participating in a
dialogue between their own time and ours. Italy is full of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century buildings that have been given spectacular modern
interiors. The Italians seem to feel that this kind of thing is precisely what
keeps their old buildings alive.
I once heard a very simple but wonderfully poetic phrase, “the ever
continuing past,” and that says it perfectly, since it suggests a past that is not
only visible but has an ongoing life that in some meaningful way connects
with the present: a living past, you might say. Here, there may be the
beginning, at least conceptually, of a way of resolving the conflict between
preservation and real life. In a place with an ever continuing past, the past is
not something sealed off to look at, and then we go back to the rest of our
lives. It is a place in which the past helps to define the present, and in doing
so it continues to evolve. The meaning of the past changes as each age uses it
differently, views it differently, interprets it differently. In an ever continuing
past, old buildings have a meaningful use in the present. It may be very
different from its original use—a printing plant may become condominiums,
or a factory may be turned into an office, or a courthouse may become a
library. Sometimes this brings significant changes to a building’s appearance
(and what constitutes sensitive change to original architecture is a whole
subject in itself), but often buildings will end up looking almost as they did
originally, with everything required to meet twenty-first-century needs neatly
hidden from view. The most important thing is that in the course of
preserving a building it is not disconnected from the present but intimately
tied to it.
Of course none of this is easy. And if a historic building stands in the way
of a new one, who is to judge which has the right to occupy the land? Is it
entirely up to the property owner? Or is there some public interest to be
served in limiting the property owner’s rights to tear a building down? Sir
John Summer-son foresaw the dilemma of historic preservation in the
modern world in 1947 in an essay entitled “The Past in the Future,”
originally a lecture that he revised to become a chapter in his classic work
on architecture, Heavenly Mansions. Summerson began by noting that the
products of most cultural efforts, such as art and literature, are easy to
preserve. He went on: “But old buildings are different. Like divorced wives,
they cost money to maintain. They are often dreadfully in the way. And the
protection of one may exact as much sacrifice from the community as the
preservation of a thousand pictures, books or musical scores. In their case
only, we are brought face to face with decisions on values. And these values
are complicated.”
 Summerson went on to list the various categories in which he believed
preservation could be justified, ranging from “the building which is a work
of art” to “the building which … possesses in a pronounced form the
characteristic virtues of the school of design which produced it.” His last
category was particularly telling: “The building whose only virtue is that in a
bleak tract of modernity, it alone gives depth in time.”
In New York, the pressures of growth and change have been intense for
more than two hundred years, and they have made grappling with the
decisions on values to which Summerson refers something of a local sport. In
1965, after the city lost McKim, Mead and White’s incomparable
Pennsylvania Station, New York established an official Landmarks
Preservation Commission charged with preserving the city’s important
architecture. The legal basis for it was in the police power of the city
government; in other words, in the rationale that this was a public benefit that
the city had the right to enforce. The law said that preserving the city’s most
important buildings was “a public necessity … required in the interest of the
health, prosperity, safety and welfare of the people,” and pointed out the
benefits to the economy as well as to civic pride.

McKim, Mead and White, Pennsylvania Station, New York

The law prevents the commission from designating any building that is
less than thirty years old, a reasonable enough way of letting the cycles of
taste that I discussed at the beginning of this chapter play out. Beyond that,
the commission uses criteria not unlike Summerson’s to make its decisions.
By its fortieth anniversary in 2005, it had designated 1,120 individual
landmarks, 104 interior landmarks, and nine scenic landmarks. It has also
gone beyond Summerson to establish eighty-three historic districts, of which
the best known are such neighborhoods as Greenwich Village, Brooklyn
Heights, SoHo with its extraordinary inventory of cast-iron buildings, and the
Upper East Side; together the districts protect twenty-three thousand
buildings. What is best about these districts is that they have reinforced the
ongoing life of the city. They are not attempts to pretend that time is frozen.
“It is impossible to preserve the ‘character’ of a place when the life in that
place has completely changed,” Sir John Summerson wrote. He is right, of
course. But the strength of the best historic districts is that they do not attempt
to make a false past, in the manner of Disneyland, but to use the past to
shelter a vibrant present.
New York being what it is, the pressures to build new have not ceased,
nor should they. The intention of the preservation effort was to save the most
important architecture and establish a sense of balance between new and old,
something that the city once seemed able to achieve naturally but by the
second half of the twentieth century no longer could—in large part, I think,
because the commercial architecture of New York (and so many other cities)
in the postwar years was so mediocre as to make almost anything else look
better than what was planned to replace it. At Pennsylvania Station, real
estate developers added insult to injury by replacing one of the greatest
public buildings in American history with a particularly mediocre box of an
office building and an ugly round drum containing a new Madison Square
Garden. There, modernism had been misread, perhaps willfully, by people
who used its principles of simplicity and functionalism not as a route to
aesthetic purity but simply as an excuse for cheap, mean construction. This
happened all over the city in those years, and it heightened the distrust of
modern architecture and significantly increased the desire to save older parts
of the city, raising the consciousness of the nascent historic preservation
movement. It’s worth remembering that the early years of historic
preservation were born as much in dislike of modern architecture as in love
of older architecture—in other words, as much out of fear of what would be
built as out of love for what people were trying to preserve.
 Charles Luckman, Madison Square Garden, New York

It was hard to blame people for preserving out of fear when the results
were like Madison Square Garden. Once, certainly in the nineteenth century
and for much of the twentieth, there was a sense that if something valued
were lost from the cityscape, something equally valued, perhaps even more
valued, would replace it. Central Park West when it was first developed in
the 1880s had a mix of decent but not distinguished brownstones and
residential hotels, very typical of what Lewis Mumford would call “the
brown decades.” One exception was at Sixty-second Street, where the
Century Theatre, a distinguished Beaux-Arts building by Carrère and
Hastings, architects of the New York Public Library, stood. Gradually over
the 1920s and 1930s, these older buildings, or most of them, began to give
way. The Century Theatre was replaced by the Century Apartments, one of
the city’s Art Deco treasures. The Majestic Hotel was replaced by the
Majestic Apartments, the San Remo Hotel by the San Remo Apartments, the
Beresford Hotel by the Beresford Apartments, all buildings of great
distinction. In each case, one landmark was replaced by another. And
sometimes the newer one was actually better.
So, too, across town, where the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel by Henry
Hardenbergh gave way to the Empire State Building, or on upper Fifth
Avenue, where the Lenox Library by Richard Morris Hunt went down not for
an apartment house but for a building that was actually smaller and lower,
Carrère and Hastings’s mansion for Henry Clay Frick, now the Frick
Collection. We shouldn’t forget the Plaza Hotel, also by Henry Hardenbergh,
replacing a lesser, and fairly ordinary, earlier hotel of the same name, or the
Bergdorf Goodman store on Fifth Avenue replacing the Vanderbilt mansion,
an even grander work by Richard Morris Hunt, or Rockefeller Center
replacing blocks of mostly undistinguished brownstones and commercial
buildings. The point is that change did not necessarily mean decline. The loss
of familiar older buildings often brought with it the tradeoff of much better
new ones.

Carrère and Hastings, Century Theatre, New York

A few stories from the early years of the landmarks commission make
clear the extent to which attitudes about particular buildings change over time
and how much the issue of preservation can affect the life of a city. The
commission became involved in a critical battle over the future of one of the
city’s most important residential landmarks, the Villard Houses, another
McKim, Mead and White masterpiece, this one on Madison Avenue right
behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral. A U-shaped cluster of brown-stones from the
1880s inspired by the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome, the houses were
occupied primarily by Random House, the publisher, which in 1967
announced its intention to move to a new office building, putting the landmark
brownstones, to use the terminology of today’s financial operators, “in play.”
The houses hadn’t been residences for a very long time—the questions were
first, whether they would survive at all, and second, in what form and for
what purpose.
 Irwin Chanin, Century Apartments, New York

The houses were designated landmarks in 1968, the year after Random
House announced its intention to move. Random House owned its portion of
the complex, and the Archdiocese of New York owned the rest. The fear that
they would be demolished was widespread, and in 1974, the developer
Harry Helmsley proposed a plan to purchase the houses and put up a hotel
and office space adjacent to them. After many different versions and endless
negotiations, Helmsley finally built his Palace Hotel, and it looked—well,
mediocre, but at least the houses were saved. The houses still look sad,
nestled at the bottom of a banal slab of a tower, with their backs sliced off so
the center section looks like no more than a stage set—but presumably it was
better than nothing.
 McKim, Mead and White, Villard Houses, New York

Around the same time, another landmarks question arose on West Eleventh
Street, one of the most cherished blocks of early-nineteenth-century
brownstones in Manhattan. In 1970, one of the finest houses, at 18 West
Eleventh, was owned by an advertising man named James Wilkerson, whose
daughter, Cathlyn Wilkerson, was active in a radical political group called
the Weathermen. She and some friends decided to make a bomb to use in
political protests—it was thought that they intended to bomb buildings at
Columbia University—while her family was away in the Caribbean;
something went horribly wrong, and the bomb exploded. Three people were
killed, and the house so severely damaged that the insurance company
insisted that the wreckage be torn down.
The architect Hugh Hardy purchased the site the following year and
designed a new townhouse that fit smoothly into the old townhouse row in
some ways but in other ways made some striking departures from the
historical precedent. “It is condescending and unpractical to assume we
understand another time well enough to recreate it,” Hardy said at the time.
“The past is not a costume rack that we loot to suit our fancy.”
Hardy preferred, instead, to acknowledge historical reality—to admit in
the nature of his design that it was the 1970s, not the 1840s. “I had no wish to
pretend that the nineteen seventies did not exist,” he said. But he also wanted
to connect, to relate, and to acknowledge that his building was a part of a
larger whole, and his design skillfully balanced these two things, connection
to context and newness.
Because the block was part of the Greenwich Village Historic District,
the Landmarks Preservation Commission had jurisdiction over anything new
that was to be built there. And at a public hearing to review Hardy’s design,
there was widespread pressure from neighbors to re-create the house as it
had been. “I cannot accept the thought of badly reproducing a house of 1844,”
Hardy said. “I have tried to knit the wall of the street back together, but with
a structure suitable to ourselves.”

Hugh Hardy, Townhouse, 18 West Eleventh Street, New York

Now that this house has been there since 1979—built ultimately not for
Hardy’s family but for some other people to whom he sold the lot and the
design—it is hard to realize that it once inspired bitter controversy, but so it
was. The landmarks commission was sharply divided and finally approved
the house by a narrow margin, with some people feeling that by doing so, it
was allowing a radical intervention into a sacred historic district and others
worried that all the pressure to re-create historical buildings as if it were
another century was going to turn historic districts into Disneyland.
At around the same time as this mini-tempest was brewing, a really big
one was heating up in Midtown Manhattan, one that would become, in a way,
the most important preservation battle of all. It involved Grand Central
Terminal, and even though the outcome is no mystery—things ended up a lot
better than at Pennsylvania Station—it is worth explaining just how this
building was saved. The saga begins in 1954, when the New York Central
Railroad, which in the 1950s had begun to treat its great train station as
shabbily as the Pennsylvania was treating its monument, announced that it
was considering tearing the building down for redevelopment. The architect
I. M. Pei, who in those days worked for the development firm of Webb and
Knapp, came up with one scheme, and an architectural firm called
Fellheimer and Wagner, successors to Reed and Stem, the original architects,
produced another. Pei’s at least was a wild, futuristic, eighty-story tower that
narrowed at the center, like a tapered waist; the building would have been
tremendously exciting, though hardly worth losing Grand Central for. The
other proposal was—well, let’s just say it represented 1950s blandness, only
more so.
The New York Central wasn’t quite ready to pull the trigger, and neither
project happened. In 1967, the Landmarks Preservation Commission, over
the opposition of the railroad, designated the terminal a landmark. The idea
of building came back the next year, this time in the form of a tower, to be
designed by the celebrated Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer, which would
rise directly above the terminal. The controversy over this one made Penn
Station seem mild. The landmarks commission said no, and Breuer came up
with a second version, in which the supports for the tower came down in
front of the facade, effectively blocking it but saving the entire concourse
inside, which the earlier version did not do. In 1969 the commission said no
to that one, too, and the railroad and its development partner sued the city,
arguing both that denying a building permit constituted an unconstitutional
taking of their property rights and that declaring the station a landmark placed
an unfair burden on the New York Central as a property owner. They asked
for eight million dollars in damages for each year the project was delayed.
Marcel Breuer, proposed tower for atop Grand Central Terminal, New York

The railroad won the suit in 1975. Immediately the preservation

community, which was growing increasingly vocal, began to protest. Philip
Johnson and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis formed the Committee to Save
Grand Central. Johnson said, “Europe has its cathedrals and we have Grand
Central Station. Europe wouldn’t put a tower on a cathedral.”
The Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court overturned
the decision ten months later, saying that economics “must be subordinated to
the public weal.” The case was appealed, and in 1978, it reached the United
States Supreme Court, the first historic preservation case ever to come
before the Court. This was the ultimate test of the validity and the
constitutionality of the idea of declaring a building a landmark, something
that had never before been tested in the Court. And it passed. By a vote of six
to three, the Court ruled in favor of the landmarks commission, upholding the
constitutionality of the New York landmarks law and confirming the idea that
a community designating buildings for preservation was as legitimate a form
of land-use regulation as zoning.
So if Pennsylvania Station was the martyr of preservation, Grand Central
became its triumphant savior, and it stands today, fully restored, perhaps in
better shape than it has ever been. The principle of historic preservation is
now accepted in New York, so much so that the arguments often seem to be
between preservation fundamentalists, who want to preserve almost
everything, and those who take a more measured view. No longer is it simply
a fight over the basic idea of saving older buildings.
Still, it is hard not to wonder what New York would be like if there had
been a landmarks commission in the 1950s. Pennsylvania Station would
almost surely have been saved, but would the Guggenheim Museum have
been built? Probably not, if preservation fundamentalists had been in charge.
If the landmarks commission had been around in the 1930s, I suspect it would
have saved Carrère and Hastings’s great Century Theatre on Central Park
West, which would have enriched New York. But would it have been worth
never having gotten Irwin Chanin’s magnificent Century Apartments? All the
way through the 1930s it was fair to assume that when a much-admired
building in New York was demolished, it would be replaced by another
building of great quality. By the 1950s and 1960s, that was no longer the
case. When the old Metropolitan Opera House, one of New York’s most
beloved buildings, was torn down in 1966 to make way for a mediocre office
tower, it seemed only to compound the insult of losing Pennsylvania Station.
There was no longer any pretense of an architectural tradeoff.
A building lost is never regained. That is perhaps the strongest argument
for proceeding cautiously and assuring that the difficult decisions about what
to save are not made in response to the short cycles of taste and fashion. For
years, the cast-iron buildings of SoHo were dismissed as tired relics; so
were the heavy masonry buildings of the 1880s and 1890s. In the same way,
much closer to our time, Art Deco buildings were disdained for years as
nothing more than cheap exercises in commercialism. Now, of course, all of
these periods are cherished. It is worth remembering this as we think about
how time will treat what we build today.
7
buildings and the making of place
I have always claimed that places are stronger than people, the
fixed scene stronger than the transitory succession of events.
This is the theoretical basis not of my architecture but of
architecture itself.
ALDO ROSSI

The street is a room by agreement.

LOUIS KAHN

Architecture never exists in isolation. Every building has some connection to

the buildings beside it, behind it, around the corner, or up the street, whether
its architect intended it or not. And if there are no buildings near it, a
building has a connection to its natural surroundings that may be just as
telling. Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, his remarkable modern house in the
Parisian suburb of Poissy that was finished in 1929, was designed to stand
alone in an open meadow, a machine in the garden. But it is not really alone,
any more than an apartment building standing shoulder to shoulder with other
buildings a few miles away on the Boulevard Montparnasse is alone. The
Villa Savoye was designed to open to its landscape on all four sides, and its
landscape was designed to be a setting for the building. Neither house nor
landscape would look the same without the other. More to the point, neither
would have taken the form it did in the first place without the other. If Le
Corbusier had designed the Villa Savoye for another site, it would have been
another building.
In the case of some buildings, like Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s
extraordinary house designed to cantilever over a waterfall in rural
Pennsylvania, the connection between architecture and surroundings is
obvious and unshakeable. More often, however, it is not so easy to see how
buildings are designed in response to their surroundings and how buildings
join with what is around them to create a sense of place. But join they do,
even if the surroundings do not serve as the prime inspiration for a design, as
they did at Fallingwater. A white clapboard colonial-style house with black
shutters facing a New England village green is different from a similar house
that sits on an open meadow, which in turn is different from the same house
when it is behind a white picket fence on a country lane. The architecture of
the houses may be similar, but the context makes them different. Take that
house away from rural New England and put it onto a street in southern
California—yes, there are houses like that sprinkled among the Spanish
Colonial houses of Los Angeles—and it looks different again, this time by a
factor of ten, since nothing about the surroundings seems naturally to fit. In
the first three instances, the white clapboard house is among similar
buildings, in a place—a New England village or a farm just outside of one—
that has an innate connection to it. In Los Angeles, it feels out of place, in
part because you associate such houses with the East Coast, and you
instinctively feel that this one is out of context. Then again, in some parts of
Los Angeles, the context is so varied that a street can well look like an
architectural smorgasbord, where nothing fits very well (or everything fits
just fine, depending on your viewpoint in such matters).
When buildings are fairly similar to each other, they make better streets.
But what does fairly similar mean? If buildings are too much the same, the
result can be oppressively dull. We look to the street, in part, for visual
stimulation, and that depends on a certain amount of variety. Think of a
classic small-town American Main Street, where there is likely to be a mix
of brick and stone buildings, one, two, and three stories high. Some may have
some stone ornament or decorated cornices, and others are plain. Some are
thirty feet wide, others forty or fifty. One shop front may have a large sign,
another a blue awning, another an old neon sign. There may be an old
limestone bank with Doric columns, and perhaps, if the town is big enough,
an office building that rises to six or seven or eight stories. No two of the
buildings are the same, but they work together, largely because they are all
fairly similar in scale—which is to say size in relation to the human figure—
and overall size; they use similar materials; and they share a sense of
responsibility to the street. They face the street, and they are organized for
the benefit of people on the street. When Louis Kahn called a street “a room
by agreement,” he meant that there is a kind of implicit consent among
architects of buildings on a street, an understanding that although they may
choose to design different kinds of buildings, they will work together and not
show each other up. Like dancers, architects follow one another’s lead and
endeavor not to step on any toes.
 But that leaves plenty of room for architectural expression. One of the best
streets in New York is Central Park West, which is far better than the stretch
of Fifth Avenue that faces it across Central Park. Central Park West contains
buildings ranging from Henry Hardenbergh’s Dakota Apartments of 1884 to
Robert A. M. Stern’s 15 Central Park West of 2008, as well as four iconic
twin-towered apartment houses from the early 1930s: the Century and the
Majestic by Irwin Chanin, the San Remo by Emery Roth, and the El Dorado
by Roth and the firm of Margon and Holder. Every one of these buildings is
different, and none of them is what you would call restrained. It is a long
way, both chronologically and architecturally, from the dark German
Renaissance Dakota to the limestone-clad 15 Central Park West, which was
designed to echo the late Art Deco buildings of the 1930s. But these
buildings fit together the same way the ones in that hypothetical Main Street
do, and for the same reason. For more than a hundred years, their architects
honored the unspoken agreement to work together, to line their buildings up
with each other and to work in a consistent scale and with materials that are
compatible. The result is a boulevard that is both dignified and visually
engaging. It is worth contrasting with Park Avenue across town, where nearly
identical apartment houses line both sides of the street for more than a mile
and a half: there is coherence, but to a fault. Disorder has been kept so much
at bay that the result is boring. Dignity is more appealing when it is combined
with visual energy.

Central Park West, New York

That helps explain why Paris, much of which is made up of essentially

one building type, the eight-story stone apartment block, works so well: not
merely because the buildings are similar—as Park Avenue shows, that is not
always enough—but because they have so much visual energy in themselves.
Moldings and cornices and balconies and grandly scaled windows and
doorways bring variety and texture to every one of those limestone facades
on the wide Parisian boulevards, and they give your eye a degree of sensual
pleasure. The average Parisian building has both lushness and solidity.
Consistency here is perfectly balanced with variety. You feel a pattern—you
know when you look at one of those apartment buildings that this is a type
reproduced all over the city—but the idea of repetition never seems to take
precedence over the visual pleasure that any one slice of the streetscape
brings.
That is true to a certain extent in many European cities, though rarely quite
as much as in Paris. In the western parts of London, in such neighborhoods as
Knightsbridge and Kensington, there are blocks and blocks of red brick
Victorian houses that function in the same way as the white-painted
townhouses of Belgravia do. (In Belgravia, there is almost too much
consistency. It’s the surprising richness of the off-white townhouses, which
look almost as if they were made of frozen cream, that keeps your eye
engaged.) The idea of rows of identical townhouses arranged in terraces or,
better still, crescents, is particularly English. Two architects, a father and son
both named John Wood, created a pair of extraordinary urban ensembles in
Bath, the Circus and the Royal Crescent, in which town houses join together
to create urban compositions that can only be called monumental. (The Royal
Crescent is one of the most stunning urban vistas in the world.) And in
London, John Nash’s great ensembles at Regent’s Park, including Regent’s
Park Crescent and Cumberland Terrace, as well as Carlton Terrace in St.
James’s, do much the same thing: individual row houses are put together into
a combination that reads as a single work of architecture—vast, elegant, and
urbane.
In the work of both Nash and the Woods, the individual houses are like
members of a chorus line. They are supposed to look identical, and their
moves are all calculated in terms of their effect on the whole. And like any
chorus line, these work only because the director knew what he was doing. In
lesser hands, the result would be confusion or boredom. But both Nash and
the Woods also understood precisely how to balance texture with uniformity.
The houses may look the same, but each member of this chorus line is
attractive on its own. Like the Paris apartment houses—or, more to the point,
like the Place Vendôme or the Place des Vosges in Paris, where identical
structures surround a square—each building on its own conveys a sense of
richness and sensuality. And their scale is comfortable and inviting. The
Royal Crescent in Bath may be monumental, but its monumentality is made up
of small parts that all feel accessible.
There are plenty of other models for an urban street beside the chorus
line, and usually streets require more variety than these crescents, terraces,
and circles possess. But they do demonstrate as powerfully as we could
imagine an essential notion of urban design, which is that the whole is more
than the sum of its parts. I will go further and say that this is the single most
important principle of urban architecture: the whole is more than the sum of
its parts. That doesn’t mean that the parts need be the same or that they need
to be as subjugated to the whole as in the work of the Woods and Nash. But it
does mean that for a city to work, architects needs to feel as if they are
designing a section of a much larger composition, a composition that began
long before them and will continue long after them, and that however
different their work may be from what adjoins it, they cannot design as if the
other buildings were not there.

John Wood the Younger, Royal Crescent, Bath, England

Planners and urban designers have tried for more than a century, without
total success, to create formulas to assure that streets are attractive places to
be. Camillo Sitte, the Viennese architect whose 1889 book City Planning
according to Its Artistic Principles is in many ways the beginning of the
field of urban design, argued against long, straight streets, which he thought
were dull, and grandiose roundabouts like the Place d’Étoile in Paris, which
he felt were impossible to cross. Sitte liked open plazas, situated irregularly,
which he referred to as a city’s “rooms.” He felt a particular attraction to the
medieval city, with its winding streets and changing vistas. His orientation
was clearly to the pedestrian and to the notion of the city as an inviting rather
than an intimidating environment.
I have a particular fondness for Trystan Edwards, an architect and theorist
(though we stretch the latter term to call him that) who followed in Sitte’s
wake in 1924 with a book called Good and Bad Manners in Architecture.
To Edwards, urban design and architecture were simply a matter of etiquette:
as a person should respect one’s neighbors, so should a building. Buildings,
Edwards says, should show deference to one another. He praises traditional
towns in which the hierarchy is clear: public and religious buildings are the
most prominent, then shops, offices, and houses. “Civic order, social
stability, and a fine, conservative temper are expressed by such an
arrangement,” Edwards wrote. “This precious standard of values, however,
cannot be maintained when there is manifested a strong tendency for each
building to display a spirit of selfishness, a profound disregard of its
neighbors and of the city of which it forms a part.” He goes on, not
surprisingly, to denounce skyscrapers as the ultimate manifestation of the
commercialism that disturbs him. “When we consider the general
consequences of this too vigorous self-assertion on the part of individual
shops it will be clear that such an architectural policy would be disastrous to
the appearance of our streets,” Edwards wrote.
Edwards’s priggishness is amusing—in a chapter entitled “The Bugbear
of Monotony,” he has a section called “The Rude Gable”—and yet he was on
to something. He knew that blocks of identical buildings are dull and also
that fussiness and overdecoration is an unsatisfying response to the need for
variety. (Another section is called “The Vice of Prettiness.”) Underneath his
pretense and his reactionary taste is a genuine understanding of the principles
that make some city streets appealing and others not.
What Edwards understood is that cities have two types of buildings:
background buildings and foreground buildings, and that they are different.
They have different missions in the city, different meanings, and hence
different architecture. A street or a neighborhood composed of too many
foreground buildings will be a cacophonous mess, even if the buildings
themselves are well designed. But a street with no foreground buildings at all
will be a hopeless bore. Think, for example, of some of the blocks in London
that are not special groupings of houses by John Nash or the like but are just
long, long rows of identical brick houses. They are oppressively dull.
Foreground buildings do not have to resemble their neighbors, and often
they are better if they don’t. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a
superb work of contextual architecture, not because it looks like anything
around it—it is a highly sculptural object of titanium sitting amid old
buildings of masonry—but because Gehry designed it with the neighboring
buildings always in mind. It opens up magnificently to the river on one side,
but when you see it from the other side, looking down one of the old city
streets, there is an even more powerful view. The museum is a punctuation
mark at the end of the vista, and it makes the city into a frame for its action.
None of this is happy accident; Gehry paid as much attention to the
surroundings of the Guggenheim in Bilbao as John Nash did to his
surroundings in London. Gehry wanted his building to stand out—it was
created specifically to stand out, to be a foreground building—but his way of
standing out came not from indifference to what was around him but from a
deep understanding of what was there and how a different kind of building
might play off against it.
If I have learned anything about what makes a city feel comfortable as a
work of design, it is that streets matter more than buildings. That may seem
like an odd thing for an architecture critic to say, but urban delight is not the
same thing as architectural pleasure, and good buildings are no guarantee of
it. Some of the most appealing times I have had in cities around the world
have been walks along streets that have no significant buildings at all:
Madison Avenue in New York, the Strotget in Copenhagen, Rue Jacob in
Paris. Each of these streets has a sense of activity, pedestrian scale, and
enough variety to keep your eye engaged, all the time. Monumental
architecture would almost get in the way.
 Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain

A city is much more than an assemblage of streets, however, and it is worth

stepping back a bit farther to say something about the city at this moment in
history, not only as a work of design but in a broader way, as a figment of our
culture. How much do cities mean in an age of cyberspace, and how much
does sense of place—one thing we expect buildings will help to give—
matter? For all that our culture today celebrates architecture, even wallows
in it, with spectacular buildings by famous architects increasingly the norm in
large, medium, and small cities around the world, I am not sure that we any
longer have the ability to create in a city as strong a sense of place as we
once did. Paradoxically, the explosion of exciting architecture—what some
people call “the Bilbao effect”—has not done much to counter the trend for
cities to become more and more like other cities, and the sense of any place
as special, rare, even unique, is fast disappearing. As J. B. Jackson, the great
landscape historian, wrote in 1994, “Architecture in its oldest and most
formal sense has ceased, at least in our newest landscapes, to symbolize
hierarchy and permanence and sacredness and collective identity; and so far
the road or highway has not taken over these roles.”
What the road and highway began to do in recent generations, and what
digital technology is doing now, is make places more and more the same.
“The road generates its own patterns of movement and settlement and work
without so far producing its own kind of landscape beauty or its own sense of
place,” Jackson wrote. “That is why it can be said that a landscape tradition
a thousand years old in our Western world is yielding to a fluid organization
of space that we as yet do not entirely understand.”
Jackson’s words are even truer for the age of cyberspace. This is not the
place to delve fully into the homogenization of culture. But it is impossible to
think about the meaning of architecture in our time without this fact, for its
impact on architecture is tremendous. In an age in which American architects
design skyscrapers for Singapore and Shanghai, when Swiss architects
design museums in San Francisco and stadiums in Beijing, when McDonald’s
restaurants are to be found in Tokyo and Paris, when expressways create a
similar automobile landscape almost everywhere, and an age in which
suburban sprawl has made the outskirts of London look not so different from
the outskirts of Dallas—is the very concept of sense of place now a frivolous
luxury? If every city is truly going to look more and more like every other
city, and every suburban node more and more like every other suburban node,
then what is the point of special architectural expression at all?
Never mind that what is increasingly becoming an international form of
architecture is fundamentally American and automobile-oriented. There is
little pleasure in the cultural hegemony that this represents, particularly since
the forces of sameness are affecting regions within the United States as much
as around the world—Boston begins to look more and more like Atlanta,
Denver like Houston, Charlotte like Cincinnati. And these cities’ suburban
rings are even more generic, products of time rather than of place. A
suburban office park in Bethesda, Maryland, is no different from a suburban
office park in Portland, Oregon; there is nothing, not even the stores within,
to distinguish a mall in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, from a mall in Fresno,
California.
Architecture has always reflected its time, and must do so. But it has
traditionally emerged from a sense of place as well as of time, reflecting the
materials, the needs, the particular sensibilities and choices of individual
cities and communities. Now, however, “sense of place” as a value has come
to feel antiquated, almost quaint, as we travel rapidly from city to city,
moving all the way across the world in a matter of hours, and more often than
not we do not actually move at all, but communicate electronically in an
instant. Even if we do not actually travel we are less rooted in a single place.
Cities are way stations, not full and complete exemplars of our particular
worlds. We pass through them, sometimes physically, sometimes only
electronically, but either way, the connection is brief and tenuous.
The meaning of community, and hence the meaning of architecture, must
change in such a world. We socialize online as much as in person, we speak
in an instant via cellular telephone to people anywhere in the world, and
human encounters shaped by their physical setting are increasingly rare.
Physical surroundings do not matter in cyberspace—to protect us, and our
computers, from the weather is the most important contribution architecture
makes to conversation in cyberspace. It does not create a backdrop for
conversation, and hence affect it in myriad subtle ways, as it does in “real”
human encounters; it becomes invisible. Architecture is no longer a stage set
for human drama. While it’s true that webcams and video chats by computer
change this somewhat by providing at least a visual backdrop, that is hardly
the same as a setting. It is still hard not to feel that in cyberspace the role of
architecture as a social enabler, as common ground, all but evaporates. Is
architecture then irrelevant to the new world technology is making?
And yet, the technological revolution makes everything, in effect, a city.
The random connections, the serendipitous meetings, that occur on the
Internet, the replacement of linear order with the interlocking web of ties,
broken and reformed and broken again a million times, the sense of accident
and surprise—these are the very events that real physical cities have always
provided and for which they have been valued. Random encounters are the
city’s greatest gift, and random encounters are cyberspace’s stock-in-trade. It
is not for nothing that commercial online services like to refer to their
conversation areas with architectural analogies—the “town square,” the
“lobby,” the “chat room”—and sometimes even show tiny computerized
images of doors through which the curious may enter. The technological
explosion is making the entire world a virtual city, a new city, the new
marketplace of human encounters, which happens not to be defined by
architectural form.
 We are not entirely comfortable in this new city, however, and I think we
are far from ready to give up on architecture. Buildings are not obsolete and
won’t become so. But they no longer define all of our public places and
hence no longer provide the sole stage for public, and thus civic, experience.
So it is inevitable that the meaning of architecture in our culture will continue
to shift, as it has shifted during the previous technological advances of the
past century. The automobile, the telephone, and television have affected how
we use, and therefore design, both public and private space, and the
computer will change things still more.
Whatever strength there may be in old cities, the traditional, dense city for
which busy, active, people-filled streets are the measure of success is less
and less something we can count on. For those situations in which we
actually do come together physically and not virtually, we increasingly do so
in places that represent a new model, something we might call a kind of
paraurbanism or pseudo-urbanism, and it has at least as significant an impact
on the evolving definition of the city as cyberspace does. This new urban
model is characterized by valuing automobile access more than pedestrian
accommodation and by a desire to combine the ease and convenience of the
suburbs with the benefits of traditional cities: thus it has a variety of shops,
restaurants, and public gathering places; facilities for the performing and
visual arts; and the general level of excitement and stimulation associated
with older, street-oriented cities. Sometimes these new kinds of places, these
city-suburb hybrids, get built in the suburbs, sometimes they get built on the
edges of cities, and sometimes they happen right inside the cities themselves.
Providing some measure of urban experience without encouraging the
mixing of different kinds of people might be said to be the new urban
paradigm: making the city safe for the middle class. If traditional cities have
always demanded engagement, the new urban paradigm seems its absolute
opposite. It sanctions disengagement even as it professes to celebrate the
virtues of urbanity.
The new urban paradigm is less truly urban than a kind of blurring of the
traditional differences between city and suburb. While numerous older cities
now attempt to market themselves as lively, vibrant, culturally active
environments, the purest examples of the new urban paradigm are surely the
so-called edge cities that now exist on the outskirts of most large cities,
combining shopping malls, hotels, office buildings, and occasionally housing
at a density that is greater than traditional suburban density but significantly
less than that of older core downtowns. Such places as City Post Oak in
Houston, Tysons Corner outside Washington, Buckhead north of Atlanta, and
Las Colinas outside Dallas mix high-rise buildings with shopping malls and
hotels; gleaming and relatively new, they would seem to have every quality
of cities except streets. Each of these places represents an attempt to take on
the more benign characteristics once associated with larger cities without
acquiring any other qualities of urban downtowns. The message is obvious:
urbanity is attractive, so long as it can be rendered friendly and harmless.
This new urban paradigm began as a product of the automobile and
flourishes now, of course, as a result of the explosion of technology. As I’ve
already said, in an age of instant communication via the Internet, no one truly
has to be anywhere. For many of us, where we choose to be is the result of
other factors. People with the means to choose where they want to be often
choose cities today not out of business necessity but for their excitement and
pleasure. To some extent the future of all cities lies in their becoming at least
a little bit like Venice or Amsterdam, places in which the tourist economy
rules. The city can no longer lay claim to being the only place in which to do
business, as it once could.
But the bulk of people cannot afford the choice of spending time in such
settings, and the closest they get to real city life is in the place of this new
urban paradigm, the edge city where urban values are increasingly suburban
values. By suburban values of course I mean much more than matters of
geography, and much more than accommodation to the automobile, though this
is surely a part of it. Yet far more important are two much more subtle but
ultimately far more profound aspects of suburban values: racial and
economic segregation, and, going hand in hand with this, an acceptance, even
an elevation, of the notion of private space. Indeed, the truly defining
characteristic of this time might be said to be the privatization of the public
realm, and it has come to affect our culture’s very notions of urbanism.
Suburbs have traditionally valued private space—the single-family,
detached house, the yard, even the automobile itself—over public space,
which they have possessed in limited enough quantities under the best of
circumstances. And most suburbs now have even less truly public space than
they once did. Not only are malls taking the place of streets in the
commercial life of many small towns, but the privatization of the public
realm has advanced even more dramatically with the huge rise in the number
of gated, guarded suburban communities, places in which residential streets
are now technically private places rather than public ones. In literally
thousands of such communities, entire neighborhoods become, in effect, one
vast piece of private property. They exist to exclude, whereas traditional
cities existed to include or at least had the effect of inclusion.
The rise of suburban values means much more than the growth of suburban
sprawl, then. It has meant a change in the way public and private spaces
work in both suburbs and cities. And it has meant that many cities, even ones
that pride themselves on their energy and prosperity, have come to take on
certain characteristics once associated mainly with the suburbs. Now in both
city and suburb, expressions of urbanity, which we might define as the
making of public places where people can come together for both
commercial and civic purposes, increasingly occur in private, enclosed
places: shopping malls, both urban and suburban; “festival marketplaces”
that seem to straddle the urban-suburban models; atrium hotel lobbies, which
in some cities have become virtual town squares; lobbies of multiplex
cinemas, which often contain a dozen or more theaters and thus exist at
significant civic scale; and office building gallerias, arcades, and lobbies.
These are all private places, and even though the public uses them, they are
not public as we have traditionally taken that term to mean.
There is another new model besides what I’ve called the new urban
paradigm around these days, and it goes by the term New Urbanism. It arose
in the 1980s in conscious reaction against the world of sprawl, mainly
through the work of Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the Miami
architects who designed Seaside, a new town on the coast of the Florida
panhandle. In Seaside, architecture is strictly regulated through codes (which
do not require traditional architecture per se, but tend to have the effect of
encouraging it), and there is a carefully wrought plan of narrow, pedestrian-
oriented streets. If Seaside can sometimes be faulted for seeming a bit too
precious—not by accident was it used as the set for the film The Truman
Show—it is exquisite and a genuine joy to walk through. It has at least some
of the feeling of the village of Nantucket and the older sections of Charleston,
and there are no better models for urban villages in the United States than
those.
Since Duany and Plater-Zyberk designed Seaside it has been widely
imitated, sometimes by them and sometimes by others, and it has become the
touchstone of a broader movement to return to the kind of communities we
built before the automobile blew cities apart. Some real estate developers
have embraced New Urbanism in the same way that others have taken up
edge cities, and the results have been uneven at best and all too often have
the disingenuous, falsely sweet air of the theme park. You cannot make a
valid place only out of yearning or out of trying to market nostalgia. But
underneath it all there is a recognition that we need to regain the things that
matter in the making of places: pedestrian scale; a close connection between
living places and places to shop and, ideally, places to work; architecture
that reinforces sense of place rather than gets in the way of it. At its best, the
New Urbanism is not so much new as true—a dollop of bona fide urbanism
for a culture that has all too often forgotten that architecture is a building
block for streets and communities.

If you believe, as I do, that one of the greatest gifts architecture can give you
is to go beyond the experience of a single building, however glorious that
may be, and see what can happen when buildings come together to make a
place, then the urban impulse, the idea of the city, and the idea of architecture
are inseparable. Architecture is the making of place and the making of
memory, and the role of the city is deeply intertwined with this pursuit. Our
memories come from places at least as much as from buildings, and when
buildings combine well to make places, whether it is the civic buildings
surrounding a football field in Nutley, New Jersey, or the monuments of
Rome, they resonate even more deeply than they do on their own. Good
streets may indeed do more than great buildings to make cities livable, but no
city has ever gotten far without serious architectural ambition as at least part
of its makeup. Good buildings support us and serve as a civilizing backdrop
to our daily lives; great buildings take us out of our daily lives and elevate
us.
The role of any city, to put it as bluntly as possible, is to be a common
place, to be common ground—to make a kind of common body of memory—
and as such, to strengthen us and to stimulate us. “Now, the great function of
the city is … to permit, indeed to encourage and incite the greatest possible
number of meetings, encounters, challenges between all persons, classes and
groups,” wrote Lewis Mumford, “providing, as it were, a stage upon which
the drama of social life may be enacted, with the actors taking their turns as
spectators, and the spectators as actors.” Mumford spoke of the city in terms
not only of meetings and encounters but also of challenges: he knew that the
city is difficult and did not attempt to pretend otherwise, to pretend that it is
the easiest route. But he knew that in meeting challenge there is also a kind of
satisfaction that cannot come from easy routes and that the challenge the city
represents can, at its best, be ennobling.
Architecture, I will say again, is the making of place and the making of
memory. The urban impulse is an impulse toward community—an impulse
toward being together and toward accepting the idea that however different
we may be, something unites us. But what do we do in an age when every
force pushes us away from cities, pushes us apart rather than together? And
how do we make valid, lasting memory when it becomes so easy not to see
the familiar, when we take it for granted and no longer even notice it? As we
move more and more into an age in which we do not automatically build
cities, an age in which architectural experiences seem increasingly
standardized and homogenized—and hence all the more susceptible to the
dangers of familiarity—we have to think hard about how the experience of
being together will come to pass and how architecture can express a sense of
community, a sense of common ground, and still somehow be able to possess
both vitality and valid meaning for our time.
Architecture represents the real, and that is ever more precious in an age
of the virtual. Every piece of architecture is an opportunity for real
experience. Some of the opportunities architecture offers us are banal, others
are irritating, and some will not communicate at all. Some will give us
comfort, which is of no small value. And some will be transcendent and will
tell you, more eloquently than anyone can express in words, of that aspect of
human aspiration that makes us want to connect to what has come before, to
make of it something different and our own, and to speak to those who will
follow us.
glossary
arch: The alternative to spanning an opening with a straight line, the arch—a
combination of bricks or stones mounting upward in a curve—is
exceptionally strong, because the curve directs the structural forces both
downward and toward the center; an arch will “hold” in ways that a
straight line will not. The Romans made great use of the arch in their
monumental civic buildings and aqueducts; the invention of the pointed
arch in the eleventh century was a key development in the evolution of
Gothic architecture.
Art Deco: Originally referring only to architecture directly influenced by the
Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1925, the term has come to
describe almost any building from the 1920s and 1930s that attempts to
give modernism a sleek, decorative flair, such as New York’s Radio City
Music Hall and Chrysler Building. Art Moderne and Streamline Modern
are other terms that refer to what might be called jazz age modernism,
modern architecture that is both more commercial and more zestful than
the International Style.
atrium: The term for the inner courtyard of a traditional Roman house has
been adopted in our time to refer to the large, covered multistory open
space in the middle of a shopping mall, office complex, or hotel.
Baroque: The Baroque style began in sixteenth-century Italy as both an
extension of Renaissance architecture and a reaction against it. Baroque
architects used classical elements but combined them in ever more
elaborate and complex ways, giving their buildings a sense of movement,
depth, and emotional intensity. See also Mannerism.
Bauhaus: An extraordinary modernist design school that existed in Germany
between 1919 and 1933, the Bauhaus brought together architects such as
Walter Gropius, who designed its famous building in Dessau, Marcel
Breuer, and Mies van der Rohe; artisans such as Anni Albers; and artists
such as Josef Albers, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky. The Bauhaus
sought to join art, craft, and technology, and its name has become
synonymous with European architecture of the machine age.
Beaux-Arts: The École des Beaux-Arts in Paris was the most celebrated
school of architecture in the world in the nineteenth century, and its
students were taught to design buildings that were monumental, classical,
highly sculptural, and generally symmetrical. The Beaux-Arts classicism
was closely tied to the City Beautiful movement in the United States
toward the end of the nineteenth century and yielded such major public
buildings as the New York Public Library and Grand Central Terminal in
New York. The high period of Beaux-Arts classicism in the United States
is sometimes referred to as the American Renaissance.
classical: Pertaining to Greece and Rome, which in the case of architecture
means not merely being ancient but referring to what has become the
basic architectural language of the Western world. Classical architecture
is based on Greek temples and Roman civil, military, and religious
structures. It is known not only for specific elements such as columns,
entablatures, and pediments but for an attitude that the architectural
historian Sir John Summerson described as “the aim … to achieve a
demonstrable harmony of parts.”
colonial: Less an actual style than a catchall term that is often used to
describe any American architecture dating from the period before the
Revolutionary War and later architecture designed to resemble it. Much
colonial architecture is English in influence; some of it is Dutch, and
some Spanish. In common usage, however, colonial connotes a house of
wood or brick, often symmetrical, which might be called a much-
simplified version of English Georgian architecture.
column: The vertical support in a classical building, typically made up of
three parts: the base, or bottom; the shaft, or long midsection; and the
capital, or top. There are five basic types, or orders, of classical
columns: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite. Each not
only looks different, each sends distinct emotional signals. A selection of
order, the architectural historian Sir John Summerson writes, “is a choice
of mood.” The term column is also used to describe a vertical structural
support in any kind of building. A modern skyscraper, for example, is
constructed on a steel or concrete frame consisting of vertical columns
and horizontal beams. A line of columns supporting an entablature or a
series of arches is called a colonnade.
Corinthian: The most ornate of the standard classical orders, a Corinthian
column is marked by a capital that suggests acanthus leaves splaying
outward. In some buildings the scrollwork top of an Ionic column is
combined with the more flamboyant Corinthian to form what is called a
Composite column.
curtain wall: The non-load-bearing, outer wall of a tall building, often of
glass or metal, that is “hung” from the steel or concrete frame that
supports the building.
dome: A spherical, oval, or polygonal roof, actually a type of vault, which is
used to define space inside a building and to create a strong profile
outside. Domes were first used by the Romans, who favored a low,
circular shape, and became a key part of Renaissance and neoclassical
architecture—so much so that the colloquial term for many Italian
Renaissance cathedrals, such as the one in Florence, is the “Duomo.” The
small, round structure often placed atop a dome is called a lantern.
Doric: The Doric classical order is austere and powerful, its top consisting
of a flat, simple slab above the shaft, the upper portion of which is
usually marked by a plain band to distinguish it from the rest of the shaft,
which is often fluted, or scalloped. In its Grecian form, the Doric column
has no base at all.
eclectic: An architectural sensibility that encourages taking the best of many
styles and is not bound to any single stance. The American architects of
the first four decades of the twentieth century who eschewed modernism
and moved freely back and forth between classical, Georgian, Tudor,
Italian Renaissance, and Gothic styles were often referred to as “the
eclectics,” but the term can represent a philosophical attitude as much as
describe a career.
elevation: A drawing of one side of the exterior of a building. Less
frequently, the term is used to describe a drawing of an inside wall, often
called an interior elevation. Together with the plan and the section, the
elevation conveys the essential information about a design. Construction
drawings are made up of a combination of elevations, plans, and
sections.
entablature: The various elements that are supported by the column: the
architrave, directly atop the column; the frieze, which often contains
 abstract ornament or sculpture; and the cornice at the top. The term
architrave is often used to describe any molding around a door or
window, as cornice is often used to describe the ornamental projection
of the roof in any kind of building.
entasis: Columns are generally wider in diameter in the middle of the shaft
than at the top or bottom, and the swelling, which corrects an optical
illusion, is called entasis. Without the slightly convex line of entasis, a
column would tend to appear concave.
facade: The front of a building, or the portion that is seen from the street.
Georgian: The architecture of eighteenth-century England, it is strongly
neoclassical and particularly urbane. The Georgian style is among the
most successful architectural languages ever created for establishing
coherent groups of buildings along streets and urban squares.
Gothic: The medieval architectural style, which developed in the twelfth
century and is marked by pointed arches, stained glass, and an overall
sense of lightness in comparison with the architectural styles that
preceded it. The Gothic cathedrals represented extraordinary structural
innovation, including the invention of flying buttresses, external supports
that enabled a cathedral’s stone walls to resist the enormous pressure of
the roof unsupported by vertical columns.
historical revivals: Most architecture has been based on other architecture,
and often the predominant style of a time has been a reinterpretation of a
previous period. The Renaissance was in a way a classical revival; in
the eighteenth century, Neoclassical architecture would be a later form of
classical revival. Gothic revival architecture was a powerful presence
for much of the nineteenth century, as was Romanesque revival.
Generally, historical revivals, unlike eclecticism, are characterized by a
commitment to a style as ideologically correct.
International Style: The term, coined by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell
Hitchcock in their 1932 book and their later exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art, refers to the crisp, austere architecture of the early decades
of the twentieth century, produced by mainly European architects such as
Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and J.
J. P. Oud. Eventually the term would be extended to describe almost any
architecture based on these early modern examples: glass office
 buildings of the 1960s, for example, are often referred to as being in the
International Style.
Ionic: The Ionic classical order is marked by volutes, or coiled elements
inserted atop the shaft, like a partially unrolled scroll. It is proper,
reserved, and tightly wound, formal without being austere.
Italian Renaissance: The Renaissance, the rebirth of classicism after the
Middle Ages, reached its highest expression in sixteenth-century Italy,
where classical elements were rediscovered and combined in new and
brilliant ways, codified by Donato Bramante, Andrea Palladio, Leon
Battista Alberti, and Sebastiano Serlio, among others. There have been
numerous revivals of Italian Renaissance architecture, particularly in the
nineteenth century.
Mannerism: In part a transition from Italian Renaissance to the Baroque,
Mannerism was a potent aesthetic, a kind of hyper-refinement of classical
elements, often given a twist or interpreted in some unusual way to
enhance their emotional intensity.
mass: The bulk of a building or its overall volume as a solid object.
modernism: The roots of the modern movement in architecture go back to the
nineteenth century and to the first attempts to seek a clarity and a
simplicity that would provide relief from dry and heavy-handed
academicism: the Arts and Crafts movement in England, the Secessionist
movement in Vienna, the Art Nouveau movement in France and the
Prairie Style of Frank Lloyd Wright and his followers in the United
States were all starting points of modernism. But what we tend to think of
as “modern architecture” reached full flower in Europe in the first
decades of the twentieth century, with the Bauhaus and the International
Style. Today, modernism is used to refer both to this historical period
and, less precisely, to architecture produced today.
New Brutalism: A reaction against the light, glass, and steel vocabulary of
the International Style in the 1950s and 1960s, New Brutalism was
characterized by harsh, bold concrete forms. Le Corbusier’s late work is
generally viewed as the inspiration for New Brutalism.
pilaster: A profile of a column, set flat against a building as a form of
ornament rather than constructed as a freestanding, round element.
plan: The floor plan, or layout, of a building, it provides a kind of map of the
various spaces within a building and helps to make clear the sequence of
movement through a building. The plan is almost never an afterthought:
indeed, sometimes an architect will create a plan before designing any
other part of a building, and the plan will function as the primary
organizing device and will be the basis of the fundamental architectural
ideas.
portico: A columned porch or entry area to a building, based loosely on
Greek temple form.
postmodernism: If New Brutalism was a search for a different way to be
modern, postmodernism was an attempt, beginning in the 1970s and
flourishing in the 1980s, to reject the indifference to history that marked
orthodox modernism and to reintroduce many elements of historical
architectural styles. Postmodernist architects at first were less inclined
toward literal copying of historical style than toward reinterpretation of
historical elements, often in the form of collage. Eventually the term
began to be used loosely to describe almost any contemporary
architecture that was not overtly modern, and it lost its original meaning.
Rococo: A variant emerging out of the Baroque, mainly in France and
Germany, Rococo architecture was even more highly decorated, often
with curving, scallop-shell motifs and pastel colors. Rococo generally
substituted lavishness of decoration for the structural and spatial
inventiveness of the great Italian Baroque.
Romanesque: Medieval, pre-Gothic architecture, heavier and more rounded
than the Gothic. A major Romanesque Revival took place in the late
nineteenth century, most notably in the work of the great American
architect Henry Hobson Richardson; this style is sometimes called
Richardsonian Romanesque.
scale: Scale is conceptual size, which is to say the size of elements in
relation to the human figure and also to one another. To say that something
is “out of scale” is not to say that it is large or small but that its size is
disproportionate to other elements, including other buildings, or to the
human figure.
Second Empire: An ornate, even grandiose, architectural style from the mid-
nineteenth century marked by high mansard roofs, elaborate sculpture,
 and often a sense of multiple pavilions making up a monumental facade.
Named for the reign of Napoleon III of France, the style left a major mark
on American public works late in the nineteenth century in such buildings
as the Philadelphia City Hall and the Old Executive Office Building next
to the White House.
section: A drawing made by cutting an imaginary vertical slice through a
building, showing the ceiling heights of each floor and the height of
special spaces such as atriums. The section is the complement to the
plan, and together the two convey essential information about the interior
of a building.
Spanish Colonial: The red tile roofs, stucco walls, open colonnades, and
pergolas of Spanish Colonial revival architecture have now become so
ubiquitous as a residential and commercial style in most of the American
West and Southwest that it is hard to remember that it did not emerge
whole but grew out of a combination of Spanish elements from early
missions and the distinct regional architecture created out of adobe for
the pueblos of Arizona and New Mexico.
style: Perhaps the hardest term in architecture to define, as well as the most
overused. Style can refer to a historical period, such as Gothic or
Renaissance or Georgian; it can also be used to mean an attitude and
approach to architecture that a particular period represents. Most
buildings do not fit neatly into stylistic categories, which is why many
architectural historians break the broad stylistic labels down into
multiple subcategories. But that can be a process without end, in part
because the best buildings often redefine style rather than respond to it.
Archictectural historial Sir John Summerson’s observation regarding the
rules of classicism might be applied to all architecture: “If the
understanding of rule is one basic factor in the creation of great classical
buildings the defiance of rule is the other.”
Tuscan: The plainest of the classical orders, it is similar to the Doric but
with a shaft that is not fluted. Simplicity in the Tuscan order comes
across as blunt and direct rather than refined and austere.
vault: A roof or ceiling in an arched shape, made of stone, brick, or tile. A
barrel vault is a simple semicircle; more complex vaults are made up of
intersecting sections, which have greater strength and can span greater
 distances: groin vaults, or intersecting barrel vaults; rib vaults, which
use Gothic pointed vaults instead of semicircles; and fan vaults, which
are more elaborate ornamented versions of rib vaults.
vernacular: Any common, everyday language of building, either historical or
contemporary: a Tuscan stone farmhouse might be described as
representing one vernacular style, a roadside drive-in as another.
Victorian: Like colonial, less a style than an umbrella phrase, in this case
covering Victorian Gothic, Queen Anne, Stick Style, and even Shingle
Style, all styles that prevailed at various points during Queen Victoria’s
reign. Queen Anne and Stick Style houses were elaborate, multifaceted
compositions, often containing multiple gables, turrets, porches, and
chimneys. The Shingle Style toward the end of the nineteenth century
represented a partial simplification and a movement toward more
unified, flowing form that helped to pave the way for the expansive
horizontal lines of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style.
a note on bibliography
The list of sources for this book could conceivably include every
meaningful book I have ever read about architecture, just as the list of
influences cited in the Acknowledgments could include every noteworthy
building I have ever seen. Could does not mean should, however, and I have
no more desire to create such endless lists than readers do to read them. I
will spare us both the burden. It is important, however, to cite a number of
books that have played a major role in shaping the viewpoint that I express in
this book, as well as to note some essential reference books, and to say a few
words about other books that have been written over the years with the
intention, like this one, of helping people understand more about the
architecture that they are looking at as they go about their daily lives.
As a college student, I first encountered several books and one article that
continue to resonate with me now. Robert Venturi’s Complexity and
Contradiction in Architecture (1966) is the book that, more than any other,
helped me understand that the purism of orthodox modernism was in many
ways a Procrustean bed and that there was no reason that aesthetic
experience in contemporary architecture could not also be rich and complex.
Its ideal complement is Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great
American Cities (1961), which attacked the folly of modernist urban
planning even more forcefully than Venturi criticized the aesthetics of
modernist architecture; more than forty years after their publication, both
books are as important, and as convincing, as ever. Herbert Gans, in The
Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (1962),
makes the same case as Jane Jacobs about the failure of modernist planning
in terms of American urban renewal but is written more as the sad story of
Boston’s failure than as a broad polemic. Charles Moore’s great essay “You
Have to Pay for the Public Life,” first published in the Yale architectural
journal Perspecta in 1965 and later reprinted in Moore’s superb collection
of the same title, edited by Kevin Keim (2001), was and remains the clearest
articulation I have ever read of the value of the public realm.
And while I am looking back, it is important here to cite three books that I
remember from even earlier than my college years that I know played a role
in shaping my feelings about architecture: Richard Halliburton’s A Book of
Marvels (1937), not really a book about architecture but as earnest and
stimulating an ode to the power of place as any boy growing up in the 1950s
could possibly read; and then, a little later, two books that I received as gifts:
Eero Saarinen on His Work (1962), compiled by Aline Saarinen, and
Masters of Modern Architecture (1958), by John Peter, both large-format
books that introduced me to many of the architects whose work I would later
encounter. (In a world that has been overwhelmed by monographs, which
these days seem to be produced by any architect who has completed more
than three buildings, few have been as dignified or as elegantly produced as
the Saarinen book. As for the Peter, now there are dozens of coffee-table
surveys of contemporary architecture, most of them better and all of them
more up-to-date.)
It was also as a student that I happened upon Trystan Edwards’s Good and
Bad Manners in Architecture (1924), quite by accident as I wandered
through the stacks of Sterling Memorial Library at Yale. (How many chance
encounters with books no longer happen in these days of libraries with
closed stacks or no stacks at all?) I found Edwards’s attempt to equate
architecture with etiquette to be endearing, if precious, and it did get me
thinking about the question of what urbanism really means. I also came
across How to Judge Architecture (1903), by the architect Russell Sturgis,
perhaps the first attempt to create a basic introduction for lay readers with
the goal of teaching them not just to appreciate architecture but to make up
their own minds about it. Far more important to my own view of things are
two incomparable books I have returned to again and again since I first
encountered them: Sir John Summerson’s remarkable collection of essays
Heavenly Mansions and Other Essays on Architecture (1949) and Vincent
Scully’s American Architecture and Urbanism (1969). These are two very
different kinds of books by two very different kinds of architectural
historians, each a great scholar who proves again that solid history is not
incompatible with masterful and highly personal writing. And both books
stand as eloquent reminders of the importance of not treating architecture as
if it existed in an aesthetic vacuum. So, too, with Scully’s Modern
Architecture and Other Essays, edited by Neil Levine (2003), an essential
compendium of critical and historical writing; to read it is to experience the
monumental arc of Scully’s career, his changing preoccupations and his
constant passion. Summerson’s The Unromantic Castle (1990) is no less
valued and proves again that Summerson was among our greatest essayists on
architecture—as does another book that is itself a long essay, his slim but
vital The Classical Language of Architecture (1966).
My copies of Geoffrey Scott’s The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in
the History of Taste (1924); Rudolf Arnheim’s The Dynamics of
Architectural Form (1977); Rudolph Wittkower’s Architectural Principles
in the Age of Humanism (1965); Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space
(1964); Karsten Harries’s The Ethical Function of Architecture (1997); and
the more recent A Shout in the Street: An Excursion into the Modern City
(1990), by Peter Jukes (a remarkable “meditation” on the city that is as much
an extraordinary compilation of quotations as a narrative work in itself), are
also well worn. I make no claims to consistency among these works, only
that they have resonated with me, as did Learning from Las Vegas (1972), by
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, and the writings of
J. B. Jackson, collected in Landscape in Sight: Looking at America (1997);
A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (1994); and Discovering the Vernacular
Landscape (1984). I should also mention three distinguished books that
helped me to see architecture in new ways: The Culture of Building (1999),
by Howard Davis, which suggests that architecture takes its form in large
part because of interrelationships among architects, craftsworkers,
financiers, contractors, public officials, bankers, planners, and so forth—
building “cultures” that have existed in most societies throughout history;
Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and
Twentieth Century Architecture (1995), by Kenneth Frampton, in which an
eminent scholar known for his interest in theory analyzes modern architecture
in terms of the reality of built form, not abstract ideas; and The American
City: What Works, What Doesn’t, by Alexander Garvin, 2nd ed. (2002), an
exceptionally clearheaded analysis of urban planning and urban design that
considers aesthetics, politics, finances, history, and culture in equal measure.
For general historical reference, it is still difficult to beat An Outline of
European Architecture, 7th ed. (1963), by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, though it
stops in the mid-twentieth century; and two volumes in the Pelican History of
Art series, The Architecture of Britain, by John Summerson, and
Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 4th ed. (1977), by
Henry-Russell Hitchcock. Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design, from
William Morris to Walter Gropius, rev. ed. (1964), is an impeccable, if
narrowly focused, history of the origins of European modernism; Reyner
Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1967) is somewhat
broader in its viewpoint. William H. Jordy and William H. Pierson Jr.’s
four-volume American Buildings and Their Architects (1970–86) is a
superb comprehensive history, as is Leland Roth’s one-volume American
Architecture: A History (2001). G. E. Kidder Smith’s Source Book of
American Architecture: 500 Notable Buildings from the 10th Century to the
Present (1996) is an excellent compendium of buildings in the United States,
organized in the manner of an encyclopedia; more recently, Jonathan Glancey
has done the same thing for a time rather than a place in his 20th C
Architecture: The Structures That Shaped the Century (1998), international
in its scope. For the full historical sweep from Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and
the pueblos onward, Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman’s
Architecture: From Prehistory to Post-Modernism, 2nd ed. (2002), and
Spiro Kostof’s A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals, 2nd ed.
(1995), are excellent. So is David Watkin’s A History of Western
Architecture, 4th ed. (2005), which is vastly more sympathetic to historical
revival and more critical of orthodox modernism than Pevsner’s Outline,
which it roughly resembles in scope, though Watkin carries the story
somewhat closer to our time.
This book was written to complement, not to duplicate, such basic
reference works. Other references that may be useful are architectural
dictionaries, of which The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture, 5th ed.
(1999), by John Fleming, Hugh Honour, and Nikolaus Pevsner, remains the
finest. Cyril M. Harris’s Historic Architecture Sourcebook (1977) and his
Dictionary of Architecture and Construction, 4th ed. (2006), are more
wide-ranging, and excellent. There are numerous guides to architectural
styles; one of my favorites is How to Read Buildings: A Crash Course in
Architectural Styles (2008), by Carol Davidson Cragoe, in part because it
also functions as a more general architectural dictionary. For structure and
other aspects of the more technical side of architecture, which my book does
not consider in much detail: Edward Allen’s How Buildings Work: The
Natural Order of Architecture, 3rd ed. (2005), and Mario Salvadori’s Why
Buildings Stand Up: The Strength of Architecture (1980). Another category
that may not seem directly relevant to this book but which remains essential
to me consists of books that I consult regularly about the architecture of New
York, many of which have, in fact, turned out to be sources for material in
this book: Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto
for New York, new ed. (1994); James Sanders’s Celluloid Skyline: New York
and the Movies (2001); Nathan Silver’s Lost New York (1967); and the
extraordinary compendium of works overseen by Robert A. M. Stern and
written by Stern in association with David Fishman, Gregory Gilmartin, John
Massengale, Thomas Mellins, and Jacob Tilove: New York 1880, New York
1900, New York 1930, New York 1960, and New York 2000 (1999–2006), all
of which I feel I could wallow in for days on end.
In the category of more personal books that aspire, as this one does, to
help the reader see: James F. O’Gorman’s ABC of Architecture (1998),
which is exceptionally sharp and clear-headed, if quite basic; Stanley
Abercrombie’s Architecture as Art (1986), a more extended lesson and
rumination on aesthetics; and Witold Rybczynski’s The Look of Architecture
(2001), an engaging and erudite conversation on the appeal of architecture in
general. Philip M. Isaacson’s Round Buildings, Square Buildings, and
Buildings That Wiggle Like a Fish (1988), though technically an
introduction to architecture for children, is so gracefully written and
intelligently conceived that it can do quite well as a basic book for anyone.
Cesar Pelli’s Observations for Young Architects (1999) is neither as well
titled nor as entertainingly written, but it is solid and wise as an introduction.
Not strictly an architecture book, but a series of commentaries on design in
general, is Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design (2007), a brilliant and
witty compendium by the graphic designer Michael Bierut. I am somewhat
less enthusiastic about two older books, George Nelson’s How to See:
Visual Adventures in a World God Never Made (1977), in which the great
designer tells us quite bluntly what is good and what is not; and Architecture
and You: How to Experience and Enjoy Buildings (1978), by William
Wayne Caudill, William Merri-weather Peña, and Paul Kennon, whose
architect-authors never break away from jargon as much as they seem to think
they have. As writing architects go, Charles Moore and Donlyn Lyndon were
far more imaginative and engaging in Chambers for a Memory Palace
(1994), a book in the form of letters to each other ruminating on different
works of architecture; Moore here did what he did best, which was convince
you to share his love of the quirky. Not long ago, the philosopher Alain de
Botton, in The Architecture of Happiness (2006), investigated with
eloquence and common sense the question of beauty in architecture and its
effect on our sense of contentment. His gentle book is a welcome addition to
the list of personal books on looking at architecture that, in our time at least,
begins with Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s Experiencing Architecture (1959), first
published a half century ago, and which, if not the liveliest book in the
world, is still appealing for its breadth, reason, and clarity.
acknowledgments
This book had its origins a very long time ago, when Jason Epstein, then
the editor-in-chief of Random House, suggested to me that there was a need
for a book about architecture that would be the equivalent of Aaron
Copland’s What to Listen for in Music, that remarkable volume that is
neither a history of music nor an introduction to musical theory but an attempt
to explain the nature of musical experience. Copland wrote with the
assumption that his readers were interested in music but had no professional
knowledge of it; his goal was not to make them professionals but to heighten
the connection they felt to an art they were drawn to without always
understanding why.
I was excited by the challenge Jason Epstein set before me, and I began
work on it. Other books intervened before I could complete this one, and I
am especially grateful to John Donatich of Yale University Press for
suggesting that I pick up this project after a long interval and complete it for
Yale as Why Architecture Matters. But I am happy to remember that it is
Jason who suggested this book, gave it its initial shape, and edited its first
chapters in their early form.
Once the book came to Yale, Ileene Smith has been the writer’s dream of
the perfect editor. Her commitment to the original idea and her vision in
seeing how it could be adapted to become part of a Yale University Press
series have been critical, and she has been a joy to work with. Other thanks
are due to Laura Jones Dooley, manuscript editor at the Press, and to Alex
Larson at the Press. Erica Stoller, keeper of the great ESTO architectural
photo archive, has graciously made so many images available for this book,
and I am grateful also to the incomparable Julius Shulman, who took the
classic photograph that is the icon of California modernism. None of the
photographs here would have been assembled without the invaluable aid of
Natalie Matutschovsky, picture researcher extraordinaire, who possesses the
perfect balance of efficiency and a keen eye. Under time pressure, she
worked with grace. My agent, Amanda Urban, has lived with this project
from its origins, and I am grateful to her for easing the transition into its final
form.
The purpose of this book, as I say in the Introduction, is “to come to grips
with how things”—which is to say works of architecture—“feel to us when
we stand before them, with how architecture affects us emotionally as well
as intellectually…. Its most important message, I hope, is to encourage you to
look, and … to trust your eye.” In many ways my greatest debt is to those
who helped me to look, and to trust my own eye, and it is hard to know
where to begin or where to end a list of those who I should be thanking here,
since it would have to include every architect whose work I have admired,
or disliked, or given more than a passing glance to. The buildings mentioned
in this book are but a fraction of a lifetime spent looking at buildings, reading
about them, thinking about them, and talking about them. One of the pleasures
of a life as an architecture critic is that almost every place you go is grist for
the mill. But I can single out a number of people who have played a larger
role in shaping my visual sensibility, either through their work or through
conversations about architecture that we have had over the years, among
them Kent Barwick, Laurie Beckleman, Robert Bookman, Richard Brettell,
Denise Scott Brown, Adele Chatfield-Taylor, David Childs, Jack Davis,
David Dunlap, David Freeman, Alexander Garvin, Frank Gehry, Allan
Greenberg, Charles Gwathmey, Christopher Hawthorne, Patrick Hickox, Ada
Louise Huxtable, Philip Johnson, Richard Kahan, Charles Kaiser, Blair
Kamin, Kent Kleinman, Eden Ross Lipson, Michael Lykoudis, Richard
Meier, Charles Moore, Nicolai Ouroussoff, Renzo Piano, Steven Rattner,
Steven Robinson, Clifford Ross, David Schwarz, Paul Segal, Michael
Sorkin, Robert A. M. Stern, Stanley Tigerman, Robert Venturi, Steven
Weisman, and Leonard Zax.
I owe deep thanks also to David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker,
who for the past decade has given me the chance to continue to sharpen my
critical eye on all aspects of the built environment for the magazine. There is
no greater place in journalism to have as one’s home. I have been privileged
to have taught for the past few years at Parsons The New School for Design
in New York City, where I served as dean before I had the good sense to
move into the classroom and where my colleagues in the Master of
Architecture thesis studio, Stella Betts, Eric Bunge, Reid Freeman, David
Leven, Astrid Lipka, Mark Rakatansky, Henry Smith-Miller, and Peter
Wheelwright—along with our students—have made me understand more than
ever the complexity and the delicacy of the process by which architectural
ideas take form.
 But at the top of the list of influences, academic and otherwise, I would
have to put Vincent Scully. To me he has been far more than a professor of
architectural history: he taught me not only about architecture but about the
essential relationship of architecture to all of culture, and about the profound
connection that architecture can have to both the written and the spoken
word. He has been a treasured friend for more than four decades, going back
to the time that he inspired me as a student to channel my love of architecture
into a life’s work and helped me to understand that there is little point to a
life that is not spent following your passions.

I once ended the acknowledgments of a book by thanking my wife, Susan, and

my son Adam for “the most precious gift: impatience.” This book has had too
long a gestation period for impatience to be of much use, but I do know that
my family has once again been there, supporting my work and the idea of
returning to this project, the origins of which stretch back to a time when two
of my three sons, now grown, were small children. Susan knew that I would
not be satisfied until I picked this book up again and finished it. She has, as
always, been an insightful and essential reader all along the way. She and my
three sons, Adam, Ben, and Alex, give me what a family should: love, and
more than few gentle nudges. They are my most valued critics and my most
beloved friends.
illustration credits
Peter Aaron/Esto, 118; Wayne Andrews/Esto, 50, 99, 101, 204, 219; James
Balaga, 14; Richard Barnes, 179; Kenny Bell, MGM/Photofest, 160; Jack E.
Boucher/Library of Congress, 12, 20; © 1989, Dennis Brack/Black Star,
courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, 187; © 1991, Dennis
Brack/Black Star, courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, 189;
Martin Charles/Trustees Sir John Soane’s Museum, 10; David Clapp/Arcaid,
113; Geoffrey Clements/Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,
purchase, with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 31.426, 157; Nadia
Shira Cohen, 123, 124; Bryan Correira, 86; Rameshwar Das, 137; Scott
Frances/Esto, 51; Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona, 132; J. Paul
Getty Trust, used with permission, Julius Shulman Photography Archive
Research Library at the Getty Research Institute, 158; Richard
Glover/View/Esto, 85; Jeff Goldberg/Esto, 90; Plamen Gorchev/Gorchev &
Gorchev Photography, Inc., 81; Samuel Herman Gottscho/Library of
Congress, 216; David Heald © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,
New York, 223; Wolfgang Hoyt/Esto, 184; Louis I. Kahn Collection,
University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical Museum and
Commission, 45; Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division,
Washington, D.C., 73, 83, 202; Sanghyun Lee, 136; Michael Marsland/Yale
University, 62; Peter Mauss/Esto, 203; Norman McGrath, courtesy Hugh
Hardy, 206; Municipal Art Society of New York Archives, 207; National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gallery Archives, 131; Cervin
Robinson/Library of Congress, 198; Paul Rudolph Foundation, 133; Ole
Scheeren/Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), 95; Pepo
Segura/Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona, 11; Walter Smalling,
Jr./Library of Congress, 119; Lee Stalsworth, 88; Ezra Stoller/Esto, 77, 80,
115, 116, 121; David Sundberg/Esto, 176, 200; Jack Woods/Warner Bros.
Pictures/Photofest, 161; Steve Zucker, 105
index
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations
Aalto, Alvar, 82
Baker House dormitory, 107
Abercrombie, Stanley, Architecture as Art, 82–83
abstraction, 14, 18–19, 78, 90, 98
Addams, Charles, 157–59, 166
aesthetics, xv, 8, 17, 27, 35–37, 56, 57, 69, 82, 97, 114, 133
architecture as object, 65–108
facade, 98–108
and function, balance between, 6–15, 42–55, 59–64
loss of sensibility, 45
shape and, 82–98
Agbar Tower, Barcelona, 92–93
airports, 54, 75, 112, 116–17, 120, 121
Alberti, Leon Battista, 26–28, 35, 103
Santa Maria Novella, 103–4, 105, 107
Ando, Tadao, 135
Church of the Light, 135, 136
apartment buildings, 128–29, 142, 201, 213, 215–19
Arnheim, Rudolf, 102
The Dynamics of Architectural Form, 102–3
art, 8, 15, 38, 42–55, 59–60, 64, 155, 172
challenge and comfort, 42–55, 59–64
and practicality, balance between, 6–15, 42–55, 59–64
shared architectural memory and, 155–56
Art Deco, 201, 216
automobile, x, 125–26, 148, 225, 228, 230, 232
background buildings, 58, 221–22
Bacon, Henry, 71–74
 Lincoln Memorial, 71–73, 73, 74
balance, 13, 14, 73, 103–4, 107–8, 178, 199, 218
banks, 22–26
classical, 22–25, 215
as icons, 22–26
modern, 24–26
Barcelona Pavilion, 9–10, 11, 75, 131
floor plan, 131, 132
Baroque architecture, xi, 120–25
facade, 128
interior space, 121–25
San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, 122, 123
Sant’Ivo, 6, 112, 122–24, 124, 129, 138
beauty, 27–28, 43–44, 142
Beaux-Arts architecture, 117, 130
Century Theatre, 201, 202, 210
Grand Central Terminal, 61, 117–18, 118, 150, 185, 186
Beethoven, Ludwig van, xii, 40, 47, 107
Beijing, 93–97, 96, 112, 225
Beresford Apartments, New York, 201
Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum, 8, 59, 66, 181, 194, 222, 223
“Bilbao effect,” 224
Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, 107
Borromini, Francesco, 6, 106, 112, 122–24
San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, 122, 123
Sant’Ivo, 6, 112, 122–24, 124, 129, 138
Boston, 75–82, 79, 162, 193, 225
Boulleé, Étienne-Louis, 89, 91
Breuer, Marcel, 207
proposed tower for Grand Central Terminal, 207–8, 208, 209
Bryn Mawr College, Erdman Hall, 44
Bunshaft, Gordon, 87
 Hirshhorn Museum, 87–88, 88, 89
Lever House, 97
canopy, 44: Sir John Soane’s Museum, 8–9, 10
Capitol, Washington, D.C., 16, 17, 72, 74, 94
dome construction, 39–40, 91
Carrère and Hastings, 201
Century Theatre, 201, 202, 210
Frick mansion, 201
New York Public Library, 185, 201
cast-iron buildings, nineteenth-century, 101, 101, 102, 199, 210
CCTV tower, Beijing, 93–94, 95, 96–97
celebrity architects, 182, 224
Central Park, New York, 150, 201, 210, 215–16, 216
Century Apartments, New York, 201, 203, 210, 216
Century Theatre, New York, 201, 202, 210
challenge and comfort, 41–64
balance between art and practicality, 42–55, 59–64
Deconstructivist movement and, 57–58
Farnsworth House, 50, 51, 51
Glass House, 50–51
Louis Kahn and, 44
Villa Savoye, 49–50, 50, 51
Yale University buildings, 60–61, 62
change, 173–74
in buildings, 173–74
cultural, 174
emotional, 173
past and, 196–211
preservation and, 197–211
Chanin, Irwin, 216
Century Apartments, 201, 203, 210, 216
Majestic Apartments, 216
Chartres Cathedral, xi, xii, 6, 41, 42, 43, 47, 94
interior space, 127–28
Chicago, 96, 100
“window,” 100
China, 93–97
Christ Church, Spitalfields, 107
Chrysler Building, New York, 107, 157
Church of the Light, outside Osaka, Japan, 135, 136
classical architecture, 10, 13, 14, 26–28, 29, 72, 101, 102–4, 107, 117, 122,
183, 185, 192, 193
Lincoln Memorial, 71–73, 73, 74
National Gallery of Art, 186–87, 187, 188–90
University of Virginia, 12–14, 14, 15, 42
Cobb, Henry, 75
Hancock Tower, 75–81, 81, 82, 99
columns, 72, 73, 122
Corinthian, 13, 14, 83, 102, 117–19, 123
Doric, 13, 14, 72, 215
commodity, 7, 8, 26, 38, 105
community, x, 39, 40, 147–48, 234
cyberspace and, 226–27
New Urbanism, 231–32
complacency, 52–53, 172
composition, 66, 70, 101, 104, 127, 219
computers, 23, 66, 67, 194, 224–28
concrete, 9, 43, 44, 117, 134, 135, 179
grid, 75
reinforced, 99
Constable, John, 48–49, 59
Corinthian columns, 13, 14, 83, 102, 117–19, 123
cornices, 98, 102, 215
tenement, 5, 6
corporate architecture, 60, 94–96, 190, 192
curving walls, 132, 134–35
cyberspace, 224–28, 229
Dakota Apartments, New York, 129, 215, 216
Dallas, 193, 225
de Botton, Alain, The Architecture of Happiness, 53, 56
Deconstructivist movement, 57–58
Delano and Aldrich, 59
Knickerbocker Club, 191
delight, 7, 8, 26, 63, 64, 105
Denver, 111, 193, 225, 229
Doctorow, E. L., Ragtime, 165–66
dome, 91, 122, 193
Pantheon, 83, 83, 84, 112, 113
Sant’Ivo, 123, 124
U.S. Capitol, 39–40, 91
Doric columns, 13, 14, 72, 215
Duany, Andrés, 231–32
Duomo, Florence, xii, 7
École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 130
edge cities, 228–32
Edwards, Trystan, Good and Bad Manners in Architecture, 220–21
Egypt, 84, 87
Eiffel Tower, Paris, 16, 96
ellipse, 92, 122
emotions, x, xv, 3, 19, 56, 64, 82, 108, 110, 133, 154–55, 170, 173
architectural memory and, 139–70
banks, 23
interior spaces and, 110–25
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 19
Empire State Building, New York, 16, 96, 127, 141, 150, 160, 174, 201
engineering, 7, 8, 94
entablatures, 122, 123
entrance, 125–27
establishing shot, 161–62
ethical approach to architecture, 28, 38–40, 42–43, 61
evidence-based design, 55–56
facade, 67, 69–70, 82, 98–108, 110, 112
approach to, 125–26
Baroque, 128
Haughwout Building, 101, 101, 102
Santa Maria Novella, 104, 105
of skyscrapers, 75–82, 99–101
of Louis Sullivan, 100
World Trade Center, 175
Fallingwater, Pa., 42, 43, 59, 213–14
Farnsworth House, Plano, Ill., 50, 51, 51, 112, 114–15
15 Central Park West, New York, 215, 216
films, 142, 157–62, 172
establishing shot, 161–62
shared architectural memory, 157–62
firmness, 7, 8, 26, 105
floor plans, 128–33
Art and Architecture Building, Yale University, 132–33, 133
Barcelona Pavilion, 131, 132
National Gallery of Art, 130–31, 131
Florida, 173, 231–32
Fontainebleau, Miami Beach, 173
foreground buildings, 58, 221–22
form, xiv, 6, 17, 36, 37, 55, 66, 67, 110, 154
architecture as object, 65–108
function and, 55
pure, 36
Foster, Norman, 91
 Beijing International Airport, 112
30 St. Mary Axe tower, 92, 93
Fountainhead, The (film), 159–60, 161
France, 49, 84, 178, 193, 213
Frick Collection, New York, 201
function, 7, 15, 54, 55
and art, balance between, 6–15, 42–44, 59–64
form and, 55
iconic, 16–26
Furness, Frank, 106, 193
Gates of the Grove, East Hampton, New York, 135–37, 137, 138
Gaynor, J. P., 101
Haughwout Building, 101, 101, 102
Gehry, Frank, 49, 63, 66–67, 134, 194, 222
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, 8, 59, 66, 181, 194, 222, 223
Walt Disney Concert Hall, 66–67, 75, 194
General Motors Building, New York, 75, 76–80, 80, 81–82, 87
windows, 78–79
geometric shapes, 82–92, 122–25
Georgian architecture, 4–5, 8–9, 10, 17, 58, 59, 152, 183, 190, 191
Soane’s Museum, 8–9, 10
Germany, 9
Nazi, 68–69, 104
Giedion, Sigfried, 31–32, 38
Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 32
Gilbert, Cass, 61
Woolworth Building, 61, 94, 184, 185–86, 191, 193, 194
glass, 9, 114, 159, 178
box, 89–91
houses, 49–51, 51, 114–15, 115
pyramids, 84–85, 85, 86, 86, 87
skyscrapers, 78, 81, 82, 92–93, 151
 stained, 127
Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut, 50–51, 114
interior, 114, 115
Gothic architecture, 7, 29, 30, 31, 33, 125, 183, 185, 191, 193
Yale University, 60–61, 62, 152, 154, 185
Gothic Revival, 29, 30
Graham, Bruce, 99–100
Grand Central Terminal, New York, 61, 117–18, 150, 185, 186, 207–9
main concourse, 117–18, 118
preservation battle, 207–9
proposed tower for, 207–8, 208, 209
Great Britain, 4–5, 8–9, 16, 28, 107, 111
Greek architecture, 7, 23, 71–72, 74, 193
Greenwich Village, New York, 199, 205
Gropius, Walter, 31, 192
Guggenheim Museum, New York, 88, 126, 151
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, 8, 59, 66, 181, 194, 222, 223
Gwathmey, Charles, 179, 181, 190
Hancock Center, Chicago, 99–100
Hancock Tower, Boston, 75–81, 81, 82, 99
windows, 78, 79
Hardenbergh, Henry, 201
Dakota Apartments, 129, 215, 216
Plaza Hotel, 201
hardness and softness, 73, 85, 134
Hardy, Hugh, 205
18 West Eleventh Street Townhouse, 205–6, 206
Harkness Tower, Yale University, 60–61, 62, 185, 186
harmony, 103–4, 107–8
Harries, Karsten, 36–37, 38, 42, 61
The Ethical Function of Architecture, 37, 38–39, 42–43
Haughwout Building, New York, 101, 101, 102
Hawksmoor, Nicholas, 63, 106
Christ Church, 107
Hearn, Fil, Ideas That Shaped Buildings, 26, 27
highways, 3, 4, 141, 224, 225
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., 87–88, 88, 96
historic preservation, 197–211
Hitchcock, Alfred, 159
North by Northwest, 160, 161
Hopper, Edward, 156
Early Sunday Morning, 157
hospitals, 38, 54, 55, 173
hotels, 86–87, 111, 129, 173, 201, 204, 229, 231
Houston, 225, 229
Hunt, Richard Morris, 201, 202
IBM headquarters, Armonk, New York, 60
icon: architecture as, 16–26
pyramid as, 87
World Trade Center as, 17–18, 176–77
Ingalls Rink, Yale University, 120–21, 121, 152, 194
interior space, 67, 103, 109–38
airports, 116–17, 120, 121
Baroque, 121–25
emotions, 110–25
entrance, 125–27
floor plans, 128–33
glass houses, 114–15
hockey rinks, 120–21
movement, 111–12, 114, 125–33
museums, 117–20, 130–31
religious, 122–25, 127–28, 134–38
temples, 112–13
train stations, 117–18
Isaacson, Philip M., Round Buildings, Square Buildings, and Buildings
That Wiggle Like a Fish, 67
Italian Renaissance, 5, 22–23, 26, 28, 183
Italy, x, 141, 148, 193, 196
Jaffe, Norman, 135
Gates of the Grove, 135–37, 137, 138
James, Henry, 170
Washington Square, 162–63
Japan, 10, 135, 136, 141, 142
Jefferson, Thomas, 12–15, 18, 189
University of Virginia, 12–14, 14, 15, 42, 107
Jeffrey Loria Hall, Yale University, 179
Johnson, Philip, 41, 54, 90, 209
Glass House, 50–51, 114, 115
Seagram Building, 77
“Whence and Whither: The Processional Element in Architecture,” 125,
126
Johnson Wax Administration Building, Racine, Wisconsin, 10–11, 94
Great Workroom, 10–11, 12
Jones, Inigo, Queen’s House, 111
Joyce, James, 49, 52
Kahn, Louis, 43, 44, 47, 49, 57, 63, 65, 134, 212, 215
Bryn Mawr College, Erdman Hall, 44
Salk Institute, 47
Unitarian Church, 44, 45, 134
Yale Art Gallery, 44
Kennon, Paul, Architecture and You, 75
Khan, Fazlur, 99–100
Knickerbocker Club, New York, 191
Knowles, John, A Separate Peace, 166–67
Koenig, Pierre, Case Study House No. 22, 156
Kohn Pedersen Fox, 60
 IBM headquarters, 60
Shanghai skyscraper, 60
Koolhaas, Rem, 49, 93
CCTV tower, 93–94, 95, 96–97
Las Vegas, 3, 86, 87, 194
Latourette monastery, France, 178
Le Corbusier, xii, 31, 49, 61, 63, 65, 106, 183, 190, 192
on American grain elevators, 91–92
Latourette monastery, 178
Ronchamp chapel, 134–35, 138, 155
Towards a New Architecture, 31, 104
Unité d’Habitation, 75
Villa Savoye, 47, 49–50, 50, 51, 131–32, 213
When the Cathedrals Were White, 31
Lenox Library, New York, 201
Lever House, New York, 94, 96
light, xiv, 11, 14, 44, 93, 110, 134, 135, 136, 137, 175
artificial, 110–11
natural, 110, 112, 136
Lin, Maya, 18–22
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 18–19, 20, 21–22
Lincoln, Abraham, 39–40, 72, 74
Lincoln Cathedral, 2–3, 6, 37
Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C., 17–18, 19, 71–73, 73, 74
literature, xii, 32, 33, 47, 155, 162–70, 172
oral tradition of, 33
shared architectural memory and, 162–70
London, 3, 4, 139–40, 225
Georgian architecture, 4–5, 8–10
museums, 8–10, 195
skyscrapers, 92, 93
townhouses, 217–19
 Underground, 111
urban design and architecture, 217–19, 222
Los Angeles, 57, 67, 75, 141, 142, 156, 170, 193, 194, 214
Louvre Museum, Paris, 84, 195
glass pyramid, 84–85, 85, 86, 87, 93
Luckman, Charles, Madison Square Garden, 200, 200, 201
Lurie, Alison, The Nowhere City, 169–70
Lutyens, Sir Edwin, 63, 107, 189
Luxor Hotel, Las Vegas, 86, 86, 87
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 27, 28
machine, 23, 31, 32–33, 183
Madison Square Garden, New York, 200, 200, 201
Mall, Washington, D.C., 71, 74, 87, 88
malls, 3, 4, 54–55, 68, 147, 148, 172, 226, 229, 231
marble, 9, 74, 77, 186, 188
martyrdom, architectural, 176–77
masonry, 5, 82, 151, 211
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Baker House dormitory, 107
masterpieces, xi, xii, 52, 58, 63
materials, xiv, 5, 9, 74, 84, 89, 110, 114, 127, 135, 140, 151, 154, 175, 179,
188, 226
McDonald’s, 3, 46, 225
McKim, Mead and White, 82
Pennsylvania Station, 117, 150, 185, 197–98, 198, 199–200, 207, 208,
209, 210
Tiffany and Company, 191
Villard Houses, 202–4, 204
meaning, culture, and symbol, xi, xiv, 1–40, 75
aesthetics and, 35–37
architecture as icon, 16–26
architecture as media, 33–34
balance between art and practicality, 6–15
 banks, 22–26
Barcelona Pavilion, 9–10, 11
beauty, 27–28
ethics and, 28, 38–40, 42–43
Johnson Wax Administration Building, 10–11, 12
morality, 28–32, 35
Soane’s Museum, 8–9, 10
society and, 15–16, 29, 35–37, 39, 40
University of Virginia, 12–14, 14, 15
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 18–19, 20, 21–22
World Trade Center, 17–18
media, architecture as, 33–34
Meigs, Montgomery, 119
National Building Museum, 117–19, 119, 120, 126
memory, architectural, xi, 24, 46, 66, 139–70, 233, 234
memory, architectural, xi, 24, 46, 66, 139–70, 233, 234
films and, 157–62
literature and, 162–70
personal, 143–55
photography and, 156–57
shared, 155–70
Metropolitan Life Tower, New York, 193–94
Metropolitan Opera House, New York, 210
Michelangelo, 7, 63, 106
David, 47
Midwest, 46, 156
grain elevators, 91–92
Mies van der Rohe, x, xii, xv, 9, 49, 63, 75, 190
Barcelona Pavilion, 9–10, 11, 75, 131, 132
Farnsworth House, 50, 51, 51, 112, 114–15
“less is more,” 104–5
Seagram Building, 47, 75–77, 77, 78–82, 151
Mills, Robert, Washington Monument, 91
modernist architecture, 18, 30, 31–34, 36, 55, 58, 105–6, 145, 153, 156,
159, 160, 161
airports, 75, 116–17
Art and Architecture Building, Yale University, 132–33, 133, 152, 178–
79, 179, 180–82
Barcelona Pavilion, 9–10, 11, 75, 131, 132
Church of the Light, 135, 136
Farnsworth House, 50, 51, 51, 112, 114–15
Gates of the Grove, 135–37, 137, 138
Glass House, 50–51, 114, 115
interior spaces, 114–17, 134–38
Jeffrey Loria Hall, Yale University, 179
Johnson Wax Administration Building, 10–11, 12
Madison Square Garden, 200, 200, 201
museums, 84–88, 186, 187, 188–90, 195
religious, 44–45, 134–38
Ronchamp chapel, 134–35
skyscrapers, 75–82, 177
time and, 177–94, 208
Unitarian Church, 44, 45
Villa Savoye, 47, 49–50, 50, 51, 131–32, 213
World Trade Center, 17–18, 174–76, 176, 177
Yale Art Gallery, 44
monuments, 19–22, 36, 71
architecture as object and, 71–74, 91
Lincoln Memorial, 71–73, 73, 74
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 18–19, 20, 21–22
Moore, Charles, 97, 98, 179–80
Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull and Whitaker, 97–98
Sea Ranch, 97–98, 99
morality, 28–32, 35, 186
Morris, William, 30, 34
movement, 125–33
Baroque, 121–22
 floor plans, 128–33
interior space, 111–12, 114, 125–33
toward a building, 125–27
Mumford, Lewis, 25, 40, 74, 171, 194, 201, 233
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 186
museums, 8–9, 36, 68, 69, 195
entrance to, 126
Guggenheim (Bilbao), 8, 59, 66, 81, 194, 222, 223
Guggenheim (New York), 88, 126, 151
Hirshhorn, 87–88, 88
interior spaces, 117–20, 130–31
Louvre pyramid, 84–85, 85, 86, 87
modernist, 84–88, 186, 187, 188–90, 195
National Building Museum, 117–19, 119, 120, 126
National Gallery of Art, 130–31, 131, 186–87, 187, 188–89, 189, 190
Rose Center, 89–90, 90, 91
Soane’s, 8–9, 10, 112
music, xii, 8, 15–16, 47, 103, 172
Nash, John, 218, 219, 221, 222
National Building Museum, Washington, D.C., 117–19, 119, 120, 126
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 130–31, 186–87, 187, 188–90
East Building, 188–89, 189, 190
floor plan, 130–31, 131
Neoclassical architecture, 58, 59
neo-Georgian architecture, 58, 63
New England, 46, 68, 166, 214
New Jersey, 143–49
New Urbanism, 231–32
New York, 5, 57, 142, 145–46, 149–51, 157
airports, 75, 116–17
apartment buildings, 129, 201, 215–17
banks, 23–24
cast-iron buildings, 101–2, 199, 210
 establishing shots, 161–62
Landmarks Preservation Commission, 198–211
museums, 88, 89–91, 126, 151, 201
nineteenth-century, 5–6, 101
personal architectural memory of, 149–51
postwar, 151, 160, 192, 193, 199
preservation efforts, 197–211
shared architectural memory of, 157, 160–65
skyscrapers, 25, 75–82, 96, 97, 99, 127, 141, 150, 160, 161–62, 174–77,
191, 193–94
street design, 215–17, 222
tenements, 5–6
townhouses, 205–6
train stations, 117–18, 150, 185, 197–98, 199–200, 207–9
World Trade Center, 17–18, 174–77
New York Public Library, 61, 151, 185, 201
Norberg-Schulz, Christian, 44–45
Architecture: Meaning and Place, 45
North by Northwest (film), 160, 161
Nouvel, Jean, 91
Agbar Tower, 92–93
object, architecture as, 65–108, 110
circle, 83, 83, 84
donut shape, 87–88, 88
facades, 98–108
monuments, 71–74, 91
obelisk, 91, 96
pyramids, 84–85, 85, 86, 86, 87, 96
rectangle, 96–97
shape, 82–98
skyscrapers, 75–77, 77, 78–80, 80, 81, 81, 82, 92–97
sphere, 89–90, 90, 91, 96
office buildings, 3, 93–97, 129, 130, 173, 190, 204, 229
Office for Metropolitan Architecture, 93
CCTV tower, 93–94, 95, 96–97
Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy, 209
order, 79, 103, 106, 122, 220
ornament, 82, 98, 111
Owatonna Bank, Minnesota, 107
Palace Hotel, New York, 204
Palazzo della Cancelleria, Rome, 203
Palladio, Andrea, 28, 29
Four Books of Architecture, 28
Pantheon, Rome, 12, 83, 83, 84, 93, 94
interior space, 112, 113
paradox, architectural, 7–9, 38, 54, 57
Paris, 3, 48, 49, 84, 96, 130, 157, 213, 225
museums, 84–87, 93, 195
urban design and architecture, 217, 218, 220, 222
Parliament, Houses of, 16, 29, 191
Parthenon, xii, 71, 72, 74, 94
past, 195–211
changing, 196
preservation and, 195–211
Pei, I. M., 75, 99, 207
Hancock Tower, 75–81, 81, 82, 99
Louvre pyramid, 84–85, 85, 86, 87, 93
National Gallery of Art East Building, 188–89, 189, 190
reinforced concrete apartment towers, 99
Pennsylvania Station, New York, 117, 150, 185, 197–98, 198, 199–200, 207,
208, 209, 210
Pension Building, Washington, D.C., 117, 119, 126
perception, visual, xv, xvi, 69, 73, 75, 102, 112, 140, 172
Perisphere, 1939 New York World’s Fair, 90
personal architectural memory, 143–55
Pevsner, Sir Nikolaus, 3, 4, 6, 37, 122, 135, 179
Philadelphia, 99, 148
City Hall, 148
photography, 155, 156–57
shared architectural memory and, 156–57
Picasso, Pablo, 40, 47
place, 44, 192–93, 212–35
background and foreground buildings, 221–22
buildings and the making of, 212–35
cyberspace and, 224–28
edge cities, 228–32
loss of sense of, 44–45
sense of, 147, 226
time and, 192–93
urban design and architecture, 214–32
Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth, 231–32
Plaza Hotel, New York, 201
Polshek Partnership, 89
Rose Center, 89–90, 90, 91
Pope, John Russell, 130
National Gallery of Art, 130–31, 131, 186–87, 187, 188–90
Port Authority Bus Terminal, New York, 117, 150
postmodernism, 180, 182
practicality and art, balance between, 6–15, 42–55, 59–64
preservation, architectural, 195–211
Grand Central Terminal, 207–8, 208, 209
New York, 197–211
proportion, xiv, 127, 140, 154
Pugin, A. W. N., 28–29
pyramids, 84–87, 96
Egyptian, xii, 7, 16, 47, 84
Louvre, 84–85, 85, 86, 87, 93
 Luxor Hotel, 86, 86, 87
Queen Anne-style houses, 146–47
Queen’s House, Greenwich, England, 111
Rainer Square skyscraper, Seattle, 57–58, 60
Rand, Ayn, The Fountainhead, 159–60, 161
Rasmussen, Steen Eiler, 73, 75, 85, 103
Experiencing Architecture, 67, 74
Reed and Stem, 207
Grand Central Terminal, 117–18, 118
Regent’s Park, London, 218
religious buildings, 3, 4, 6, 16, 23, 27–28, 29, 43, 44, 134–38
Baroque, 6, 112, 122–25, 128
interior spaces, 122–25, 127–28, 134–38
modernist, 44–45, 134–38
Renaissance architecture, xi, 5, 22–23, 26, 28, 117, 122, 125, 193
Richardson, Henry Hobson, 193
Trinity Church, 79
Robertson, Jacquelin, 58, 189
Robie House, Chicago, 132
Rockefeller Center, New York, 94, 150, 202
Rogers, James Gamble, 60, 152–53, 185
Harkness Tower, Yale University, 60–61, 62, 185, 186
Memorial Quadrangle, 60, 185
Romanesque architecture, 183, 193
Rome, 3, 6, 7, 12, 26, 83, 203, 233
churches, 6, 7, 94, 112, 122–24
temples, 83, 83, 84, 93, 94, 112, 113
Ronchamp chapel, 134–35, 138, 155
Rose Center, American Museum of Natural History, New York, 89–90, 90,
91
Royal Crescent, Bath, England, 218, 219
Rudolph, Paul, 132, 133, 179, 182
 Art and Architecture Building, Yale University, 132–33, 133, 152, 178–
79, 179, 180–82
Ruskin, John, 29–31, 34, 35
The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 29
The Stones of Venice, 29
Saarinen, Eero, 120–21, 134, 152, 194
Ingalls Rink, Yale University, 120–21, 121, 152, 194
TWA Terminal, 75, 116, 116, 117, 120, 121, 194
St. Peter’s, Rome, 7, 94
San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome, 122, 123
San Francisco, 97, 193, 225
San Remo Apartments, New York, 201, 216
Santa Maria Novella, Florence, 103–4, 105, 107
Sant’Ivo, Rome, 6, 112, 122–24, 124, 129, 138
scale, xiv, 5, 30, 79, 103, 127, 140, 154, 188
Scheeren Ole, 93
CCTV tower, 93–94, 95, 96–97
school buildings, 12–15, 38, 42, 54, 55, 69, 130, 132–33
memories of, 143, 166
time and, 172–73
Scott, Geoffrey, 109, 120
Scully, Vincent, xi, 154
Seagram Building, New York, 47, 75–77, 77, 78–82, 151
windows, 78
Sea Ranch, California, 97–98, 99
Sears Tower, Chicago, 94, 96
Seaside, Florida, 231–32
Sebald, W. G., 170
Austerlitz, 167–69
September 11 attacks, 17–18, 176–77
Shakespeare, William, 47, 189
Shanghai, 60, 194, 225
shape, xiv, 67, 82–98, 110, 125
architecture as object, 75–98
CCTV tower, 93–94, 95, 96–97
circle, 83–84, 112
donut, 87–88, 119
ellipse, 92, 122
funnel, 112
geometric, 82–92, 122–25
gherkin, 92
obelisk, 91, 96
perception of, 75
pickle, 92, 93
planar, 75
plastic, 75
pyramid, 84–87, 96
rectangle, 96–97, 135, 136
skeletal, 75
skyscrapers, 75–82, 92–93
sphere, 89–91, 96
square, 97
triangle, 122–23
shared architectural memory, 155–70
shelter, ix, 8, 52
Shingle Style, 58, 190, 191
Shulman, Julius, Case Study House #22, 156, 158
Siegel, Robert, 179
similarity, in urban design, 214–15, 217–19, 221, 225–26
Simpson, Veldon, Luxor Hotel, 86, 86, 87
Sitte, Camillo, City Planning according to Its Artistic Principles, 220
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, 87
Hancock Center, 100
Hirshhorn Museum, 87–88, 88
skyscrapers, 4, 75–82, 141, 150, 160, 161, 174, 191, 221
 early, 100
facades, 75–82, 99–101
General Motors Building, 75, 76–80, 80, 81–82, 87
Hancock Tower, 75–81, 81, 82, 99
office space, 93–97
Seagram Building, 47, 75–77, 77, 78–82, 151
shape, 75–82, 92–97
time and, 174–77, 185–86, 191, 193–94
windows, 78–79, 100
Smithson, Robert, Wollaton Hall, 107
Soane, Sir John, 8–9, 63, 133
breakfast room, Sir John Soane’s Museum, 8–9, 10, 112
reputation of, 182
Soane’s (Sir John) Museum, London, 8–9
breakfast room, 8–9, 10, 112
social responsibility of architecture, xiii–xiv, 35–37, 43, 61, 68–69, 174
society, 15–16, 29, 35, 39, 40, 177
loss of sense of place, 44–45
Society Hill Towers, Philadelphia, 99
SoHo, New York, 199, 210
solid and void, 73, 85, 178
space, xiv, xvi, 6, 61–63, 119–20
Baroque, 121–25
entrance, 125–26
interior, 67, 103, 109–38
movement through, 127–33
nineteenth-century concept of, 120
virtual, 66
“wasting,” 133
Spain, 9, 10, 92, 141
Spanish Colonial architecture, 58, 214
Speer, Albert, 68–69, 104
steel, 9, 10, 193
Stern, Robert A. M., 58, 190
15 Central Park West, 215, 216
Stone, Edward Durell, 75, 78
General Motors Building, 75–80, 80, 81–82, 87
style, xiv, 34, 70, 74, 75, 154
as language, 189
reused from the past, 34
time and, 34, 182–94. See alsospecific architectural styles
suburbs, x–xi, 3, 142, 144, 146, 225–26
edge cities, 228–32
personal memories of, 146–48
sprawl, 231
Sullivan, Louis, xii, 100, 106
facades of, 100
Owatonna Bank, 107
Summerson, Sir John, 181, 197, 199
Heavenly Mansions, 197
The Un-romantic Castle, 171
supermarkets, 147–48
Sydney Opera House, 8, 16
Taj Mahal, xii, 72, 125
Tate Modern, London, 195
technology, xiii, 193–94, 224–28
cyberspace, 224–28, 229
time and, 193–94
television, 155, 162, 228
tenements, 5–6
texture, xiv, 99, 127, 128, 137, 154, 218
30 St. Mary Axe tower, London, 92, 93
Tiffany and Company, New York, 191
time and buildings, 171–211, 226
change and, 173–74
 modernist architecture and, 177–94, 208
place and, 192–93
preservation of older architecture, 195–211
reputation and, 181–82
skyscrapers and, 174–77, 185–86, 191, 193–94
style and, 34, 183–94
technology and, 193–94
World Trade Center, 174–77
Yale Art and Architecture Building, 178–82
Time-Life Building, New York, 150
Times Square, New York, 142, 150
Townhouse, 18 West Eleventh Street, New York, 205–6, 206
townhouses, 205–6, 217–19
train stations, 117–18, 150, 185, 197–98, 199–200, 207–9
Trinity Church, Boston, 79
Trinity Church, New York, 151
Turnbull, William, 97
Turner, J. M. W., 156
TWA Terminal, Kennedy Airport, New York, 75, 116–17, 120, 121, 194
interior view, 116, 116, 117
Unitarian Church, Rochester, New York, 44, 45, 134
Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles, 75
United Nations, New York, 25, 97
Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois, 47, 112, 134, 136, 138
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 12–15, 42, 43, 107
Lawn, 13–14, 14
urban design and architecture, 214–32
cyberspace and, 224–28, 229
edge cities, 228–32
New Urbanism, 231–32
similarity in, 214–15, 217–19, 221, 225–26
streets, 214–24
Utzon, Jorn, Sydney Opera House, 8, 16
Vanderbilt mansion, New York, 202
Venice, 156, 191, 194, 230
Venturi, Robert, 36, 49, 63
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 36, 104–6
vernacular architecture, 2–6, 45–47
Victorian houses, 147, 217
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C., 18–19, 20, 21–22
Villard Houses, New York, 202–4, 204
Villa Savoye, Poissy, France, 47, 49–50, 50, 51, 131–32, 213
Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel, 30–31
Vitruvius, 7, 26, 35, 38, 63, 64, 105
Waldorf Astoria Hotel, New York, 201
walls, 98–99, 135
curving, 132, 134–35
Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, 66–67, 75, 194
Ward Willets House, Highland
Park, Illinois, 132
Warren and Wetmore, Grand Central Terminal, 117–18, 118, 185, 186, 207–
9
Washington, D.C., 19–21, 71–74, 87–88, 91, 117–19, 229
monuments and memorials, 17–19, 20, 21–22, 71–73, 73, 74, 91
museums, 117–19, 119, 120, 130–31, 131, 186–87, 187, 188–89, 189, 190
Washington Monument, Washington, D.C., 19, 91
Wharton, Edith, 163–65, 166, 170
The Age of Innocence, 163–65
The Decoration of Houses, 163
White House, 16, 17
windows, 98, 114
bay, 78–79
Chicago, 100
skyscrapers, 78–79, 100
Winterson, Jeanette, 48, 52, 59
Art [Objects], xvi
Wollaton Hall, Nottingham, 107
Wood, John, 218
Royal Crescent, 218, 219
Woolworth Building, New York, 61, 94, 184, 185–86, 191, 193, 194
World Trade Center, New York, 17, 174–76, 176, 177
iconic status of, 17–18, 176–77
September 11 attack, 17, 176–77
Wright, Frank Lloyd, x, xii, 22, 32–34, 47, 49, 53, 159, 183, 190
“The Art and Craft of the Machine,” 32–34
Fallingwater, 42, 43, 59, 213–14
floor plans, 132
Guggenheim Museum, 88, 126, 151
Johnson Wax Administration
Building, 10–11, 12
Larkin Building, 178
movement and, 126
Prairie Houses, 32
reputation of, 181–82
Robie House, 132
Unity Temple, 47, 112, 134, 136, 138
Ward Willets House, 132
Wyeth, Andrew, Christina’s World, 156
Yale Art Gallery, New Haven, 44
Yale University, New Haven, 60–61, 152–55, 185
Art and Architecture Building (Paul Rudolph Hall), 132–33, 133, 152,
178–79, 179, 180–82
Harkness Tower, 60–61, 62, 185, 186
Ingalls Rink, 120–21, 121, 152, 194
Jeffrey Loria Hall, 179
Memorial Quadrangle, 60, 185
Yamasaki, Minoru, 175
Rainer Square skyscraper, 57–58, 60
World Trade Center, 174–75, 176, 177