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PAUL Goldberger lectures

Architecture Criticism: Does It Matter?


Butler University, Indianapolis, IN
November 12th, 2003
Good evening. I am very happy to be here, and I want to thank the dean for conceiving of this
event in which critics get a chance to say some things that we might not, perhaps, say in print,
and to think in public for a little while about the whole purpose of criticism. Critics, like so many
professionals, not only in journalism but in every field, often do what they do by rote, without
spending enough time examining exactly what it is and why they are doing it, and the fact that I
have had to travel to Indianapolis to think hard about what I do in New York well, Im not sure
what that means, but Im glad Im here, as I said.
Actually, the only other time recently Ive had occasion to talk about the meaning of criticism it
was to a group of architects, and I felt I had to start out by telling them that while it is all well
and good to talk about the relationship of architecture criticism in the media to the architecture
profession itself, it is not written for them, that they are not the audience. The people who walk
past buildings in the city, and the politicians who deal in appropriations and budgets and
planning and preservation, and the people who figure out how to finance things, and the people
who yearn to have things they are all the audience, not the architects themselves.
But now, of course, I cant say that, since you are the group that I was referring to when I talked
to the architects you are the consumers of architecture, not the creators of it. And criticism in
any field, whether it be architecture, art, theater, film, music, dance, television or whatever, is
written for the consumers, not the practicioners, of that field. That is not to say that is merely a
consumer guide quite the contrary. Criticism that positions itself that way has no ambition, and
ultimately very little meaning. It has no reach, it has no resonance in the culture, and it will not
last. But if criticism is not wholly a consumer guide, and should never be thought of as having
that as its primary mission, it is equally true that it is not not a consumer guide. Helping people
to understand whether something is worth their while and worth their time, and their money
is part of the mission of the critic. It is just that, for me, that is only the most limited, narrow part
of the critics function, and any critic who is not able to go beyond it will not produce any work
of any real value.
Criticism is writing, and at its best it is enlightening. I want to read the best film critics whether
or not I have any intention of going to the movies; I want to read book reviews whether or not I
am looking for something to read; I want to read my favorite art critics even if I have no time to
go to the museum. Indeed, sometimes I read them especially because I have no time to go to the
museum not because I believe that the critics writing is a substitute for the experience of
looking at art, but because I believe it will teach me something that I need to know and want to
know and that will enrich my sense of connection to art, or film, or music, or whatever.

I spent several years as the culture editor of The New York Times, where I supervised all of the
critics in each area of the arts, and I am pretty aware, I think, of the issues that come to the fore
in criticism in each area, and also of the differences from one discipline to the other. The impact
of criticism and its connection to both the people who create and the people who consume is not
quite the same in each field. For tonight, however, Id prefer to stick mostly to my own subject,
architecture, even though I know architecture isnt fully typical. One reason is that there have
been theater critics and book critics since time immemorial, but there havent been architecture
critics on daily newspapers since Ada Louise Huxtable was appointed the first full-time
architecture critic on the staff of The Times in 1963, forty years ago although I feel I should
point out that Lewis Mumford, perhaps the twentieth centurys greatest architecture critic, wrote
for The New Yorker for much of the nineteen-thirties, forties and fifties, long before Ada Louise
went to The Times. So we have a longer tradition at The New Yorker, where I now am, than The
Times does. Not, of course, that I would ever keep score with my former employer. In any event,
while there are more architecture critics now than there once were, and several notable ones,
there are far too many papers that do not recognize architecture criticism as a legitimate field of
arts criticism that still put architecture writing in with real estate coverage, or perhaps with
"home" and "style" coverage. I didnt realize it at the time, but the great contribution that The
New York Times made was not merely in hiring Ada Louise Huxtable, it was in asserting that
architecture was to be considered one of the arts.
That doesnt make it only an art, of course it is the particular, and peculiar, nature of
architecture that it is so many subjects, all at once, and I will get back to that in a moment. For
now, let me say only that if architecture criticism in the general media that is, newspapers,
magazines, and occasionally television has any purpose, it is to communicate between the
profession and a public that, for all its fascination, even passion, for design, seems never quite to
understand what it is and how it works. That is pretty obvious, and basic. If it didnt sound
hopelessly pompous, I would elaborate on that and make the equally obvious statement that the
purpose of architecture criticism in the general media is to create a better educated, more
critically aware, more visually literate constituency for architecture, and thus, presumably,
increase societys demand for good design. Since I dont want to sound hopelessly pompous, I
wont say that. I am not here to advocate for architecture critics who parade around as
missionaries, believing that they are saving the world, or rescuing it from the sins of ignorance.
Still, at the end of the day, this whole notion isnt so far from the truth. It isnt the only reason
people like me do what we do, but it is a big part of it, and while it is important not to get carried
away with your importance, and to believe that you are there to provide enlightenment for the
unenlightened masses, it is equally important not to forget that a substantial part of what a critic
does is to educate. If you believe in education, and you believe in what we can call visual
literacy, and you believe that there is some way in which design can make the quality of life and
the quality of community better, then you have to believe that this is at least part of why design
criticism exists, and why it is essential that the profession not talk only to itself.
If a large part of our jobs is to provide a kind of bridge, you might call it, between the profession
and the public, I think it is worth talking about what goes across that bridge, and what role a
critic should have in policing it. Maybe a bridge is actually the worst possible analogy, because
the last thing a critic should be providing is open, unfettered passage in both directions. A critic
isnt just the bridge itself; he or she is also the traffic cop in front of the bridge, selecting and

limiting what gets across, or there is no point to his or her existence. While it is important for a
critic to demonstrate enthusiasm and convey his or her enthusiasm to readers I do not think we
have ever done better than Matthew Arnolds definition of criticism as "a disinterested endeavor
to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world" we all know that
everything is not worthy of advocacy, of propagation, and that the critic has to be a filter of
ideas. He or she has to determine what goes across that bridge and how, since the most important
quality a critic provides, in the end, is judgment. In a wise critic that judgment is tempered by
enthusiasm, although surely many critics could be described more in terms of having enthusiasm
tempered by judgment and I think the difference between those two speaks more to the
personality of individual critics rather than to any critical or journalistic imperative anyway,
whether it is judgment tempered by enthusiasm or enthusiasm tempered by judgment, a critic
needs both of these qualities to be of any value.
Both judgment and enthusiasm are ways of expressing love, and a critic who does not love his
field cannot last long in it. To love the thing whatever it is, and as I say this I realize that even
though I said I would be talking mainly about architecture, this point extends to every critical
field in any event, to love the thing and also to love what it means in other peoples lives, and
not only your own is, I think it is fair to say, a further prerequisite to functioning well as a
journalistic critic. I dont mean to be drifting toward the missionarys identity here; maybe what I
am really trying to say is that a critics role, among other things, is to be a kind of interpreter, to
communicate his love of things and in so doing, instill love in others.
Now, I realize that all of this sounds a little touchy-feely, or maybe a little soft in the head. It
definitely feels distant from the notion that the point of this realm of journalism is to be tough,
and judgmental, and to expose the wretchedness of ninety-nine percent of what gets built in this
country, or the ridiculous lack of quality in most books or movies or television shows. Okay.
This is all true. Mere enthusiasm, no matter how eloquently expressed, is not enough to carry the
day, or at least not enough to build a viable career on as an architecture critic or any other kind of
critic, although there are times when communicating your enthusiasm convincingly and
creatively is the highest achievement a critic can have. But the fact of the matter as all of you
know is that only a handful of what critics encounter can truly be called masterpieces, and so it is
a rare piece of criticism in which the poetic expression of enthusiasm is sufficient. I suppose I
was guilty of trying to do that just a week or two ago when I wrote about Disney Hall in Los
Angeles, which I genuinely believe is the great building of our time, and one that surpasses
Bilbao. My own response to it was overwhelmingly positive, although I found myself there
doing a couple of things that surprised me a bit. As I wrote I began to answer some of the
criticisms that you hear around about Frank Gehry that the buildings are too much the same,
that they are all of a type, that it doesnt do enough to connect to the surroundings, that it is
elitist, etc. etc. In the case of this building these arguments could not be more wrong, and my
first instinct was to ignore them, but then I realized that some people actually believe this
nonsense, and that perhaps I could perform a service if I crafted a response. That would also, I
might add, give me a chance to say something a bit different, since even last month when I wrote
that piece, five weeks before Disney Hall even opened, the chorus of ecstatic praise was
beginning to seem a little much. I didnt want to contradict it just for the sake of being different,
which would have been ridiculous; it would have involved denying how good the building truly
is. But neither did I want to disappear into the din of adoration. For me the issue of responding to

the wrongheaded criticisms that some have expressed was a way to do that. I also wanted to
think about the building as a part of the public realm, to think about what it means as public
space after all, we live in an age of private experience, especially so far as music is concerned,
which most people consume via electronic means. The concert hall is basically an old building
form, left over from the age when it was the only way in which orchestral music could be
delivered. How do you reinvent this building type so that the public experience that it represents
will have meaning for an age in which private experiences of music private experiences of
almost every kind, I should say predominate?
That is Gehrys great achievement here, and something I tried to talk about, at least briefly, and I
should say further that our decision to do this when we did in The New Yorker, on a very tight
week, did not allow enough space to explore most of these issues in full detail. But I was
especially happy to deal with the building in the context of downtown Los Angeles, since issues
of urbanism and context have always meant a great deal to me.
It goes without saying that writing about urban context and land use is an essential part of
architecture and design criticism: for some people it is the most essential part, and the one that
comes closest to affecting their lives. The truly important thing and I will say this again and
again is that no building is an aesthetic object in isolation, the way a painting or a piece of
sculpture is. You cannot draw a line separating out the part of what we do that covers a house or
a teapot from that which covers an entire city. To the extent that any building should be
conceived and evaluated as an aesthetic object, it must also be conceived and evaluated in terms
of what we might call the aesthetics of context.
But of course no building can be viewed solely through the lens of aesthetics anyway, or at least
it should not. Architecture criticism is aesthetics and it is politics and it is sociology and it is
culture, and if you do not accept the notion that all of these things are intimately intertwined,
then you fail to understand what has to be the foundation of all writing about design, which is
that every object has an aesthetic presence and a social one at the same time, or, to put it another
way, every object is both a physical thing and a political thing, and it has to be understood and
criticized as both. It is not one or the other, but both, all the time.
How much does criticism matter? Thats the question underlying everything, of course, the one
most people, or at least most architecture critics, tend to be afraid to confront directly, for fear
that the answer is going to be, not very much. I think this fear is perfectly reasonable. I dont
think criticism matters very much, at least not in the sense that a lot of people, including
architects, want it to matter. It doesnt change the world; it doesnt heal the sick, or feed the
hungry. It doesnt even change the nature of architecture all that much. If the theater critic of The
New York Times doesnt like a Broadway show, it may well close. Nobody tears down a
building if the architecture critic doesnt like it.
But that doesnt mean that architecture and design criticism is ignored, and if you suspect I am
being slightly disingenuous in suggesting that it has minimal effect, you are right. Actually,
criticism in this field has tremendous effect, though I dont believe it is particularly tangible or
quantifiable. Its effect, I think, is gradual, and subtle, and really does come down to the issue I
talked about a couple of minutes ago, which is the creation of a more visually literate public that,

presumably, will be a constituency for better architecture and design. Its true that nobody tears
down a building if the architecture critic doesnt like it. But what may well happen is that the
next building will be at least a little bit different, either because the developer learned something
from what has been written, or because an energized public demanded it. The preservation
movement, which is now hardly news and in fact is venerable enough to have instilled a kind of
counter-reaction in the last couple of years, is a broad social phenomenon that was spurred on
with significant help from the press; more recently, the New Urbanism, and the debates over
what makes a viable suburb over whether that is not in itself a kind of oxymoron, and whether
it is possible to create a civilizing community that is fully accepting of the automobile is an
issue in which press coverage has been central, if not always particularly enlightening.
Probably all of you know of the extent to which public activism on matters of design, planning
and preservation has now become part and parcel of the way things are built, of the way we
construct what passes in this day and age for a public realm. But it is in the nature of architecture
that it cannot be wholly an act of social criticism; it is, after all, partly a matter of creating a
civilizing and comforting environment. Challenge is essential to the making of art, and while it is
also a part of the equation of architecture, so is comfort. The critic has to balance all of this, and
try to figure out where so-called smart growth is truly smart and where it is just a new-age
developers slogan; just as it is the critics job to determine which difficult buildings yield
pleasure and meaning, and which ones are merely difficult and hostile; and whether the natural
imperative that places evolve and change over time results in a net gain or a net loss in the
quality and meaning of cities and towns and villages.
A couple of years ago there was a survey about the impact of architecture criticism organized by
the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, which stated that while
architecture is the most public art form, it is the one least subject to public debate. Im not sure
this is right. Certainly the first premise, that architecture is the most public art form, is true, and
has always been so, but for the last several years the second premise, that it is the least subject to
public debate, has been less and less true, at least in major cities. The debate does not always go
on at the highest level, but it is happening, more and more indeed, given the turmoil
surrounding Ground Zero, which Ill come back to in a moment, I think it is fair to say that we
are seeing more public interest in land-use and planning questions than we have ever seen at any
point in any of our lives. The survey also indicated an irritation on the part of critics with the star
system, and while it didnt suggest that they were particularly committed to trying to get beyond
it, it is clear from some of the comments made about many star architects that there is a kind of
social conscience driving a lot of architecture criticism today that critics believe, rightly or
wrongly, is at odds with the priorities of both celebrity architects and theorists. Im not sure that I
buy the argument that there is a zero sum game between attention given to Bilbao and thoughtful
discussion, say, of neighborhood preservation; Im more inclined to believe that the sexiness of
Bilbao, or I guess we should now say Disney Hall, since that is the Gehry du jour, as well as the
attention given to certain other pieces of high-profile architecture, actually raises the bar for
everything, by the simple fact of increasing the degree of public interest in what the world they
live in looks like.
So I think the star system, for all its obvious limitations and oversimplifications, for all that it
panders to the worst aspects of our society, is not an entirely negative thing for architecture. It

has allowed more public dialogue on real issues, and that is important. Civic activists are deeply
affected by architecture and design criticism they are spurred on by it, encouraged by it,
supported by it, sometimes incited by it. Journalism is a kind of lifeblood for civic activism,
which is why, paradoxically, it is sometimes easier for design journalists to have an effect on the
broadest strokes than on the narrowest ones or at least easier for them to be paid attention to.
That survey by the National Arts Journalism Program on the state of architecture criticism,
which dealt mainly with newspapers, as I recall, concluded that what matters most to architecture
critics right now is the urban fabric, not the individual building. Most critics reject an emphasis
on theory, and they seem, even as they write about individual "prima donna" or celebrity
architects, to dislike them, or to feel uncomfortable about the star attention that they receive. It is
the city that matters, the sense of community, the urban fabric, and they say they try to reflect
this in their writing.
I think they do so because they feel that this is what their readers want to find some place in
which architecture intersects with their own lives, and that happens generally in stories about
planning and preservation and large-scale development. I think critics also feel that in writing
about community and urban fabric, they are on fairly safe ground after all, is there anyone
around today who doesnt to some extent embrace the set of values we could describe as those of
Jane Jacobs? Even modernists believe in streets now. Well, maybe some people dont. There are
the people crusading to rebuild the World Trade Center as it was, but lets leave them aside for
the moment. Basically it is fair to say that if there is any sense of shared values today in our view
of design, it is about certain kinds of urbanistic values, a belief in the street and in the sense that
cities are complex, heterogeneous wholes, not collections of isolated sculptural objects.
All well and good, but I think critics are often most comfortable with this value system also
because it doesnt appear to be too elitist, and it doesnt offend. Architecture critics seem most
comfortable with a kind of populism, which is odd, I think, and worth exploring for a moment. If
you are brought up to believe that architecture is good for everyone, that it is a virtuous thing that
makes life better, than your value system is, by definition, somewhat broad-based and populist,
perhaps too much so you find yourself preaching, talking about what is good for people, and
sinking into the hopelessly general. And it is difficult to engage in the sharp, often harsh,
judgments that a critic must, because you are thinking too much about how places make people
feel good, and not about much of anything else.
Architecture is a public art, and it is ever-present; we all know that. But does that mean that only
what makes people feel good is worthwhile? I would hope not. I worry terribly about a kind of
dumbing down of architecture criticism, about too much concern for feeling good, and not for
advancing the art. But I do know that Frank Gehrys genius is that he is the only architect who
has managed to combine bold, innovative, astonishingly creative form-making with a deep,
almost passionate concern for emotional and even physical comfort. It is not an accident that his
popularity spans the lay public and the critical and academic professions as few other architects
have ever managed to do, in our time or any other.
The profession of criticism has had some classic villains, and some classic heroes. Often, indeed,
critics portray the story of building as a kind of Western, as a cowboys-and-indians drama

between the good guys the architects who want to build great and special things and the bad
guys, who are the developers and the politicians who get in the way and force compromises and
slice budgets and ruin everything. The lack of ambiguity in this way of seeing the world I find
extraordinary. If only things were so simple, and if only architecture with a capital A were such
an unfettered good, such a noble thing to uplift us all and if only everyone who makes money
were such an obvious evil. A lot of writing in several criticial fields proceeds from a similar kind
of premise: there is Great Art or Great Literature or Great Music, and then there are the Evil
Forces of Darkness read money that are out to get these holy and sacred things. Well, if only
it were so simple. I am not na-ve about the pernicious effect of money on the culture, and I do
not mean to be complacent about it, but I do think one has to be realistic about the complex
forces at work, particularly in a field such as architecture. I have read some architecture criticism
that seems to suggest that, if only the evil corporate and political forces were not blocking their
will at every turn, then all of the people, left to their own devices, would be screaming for more
buildings by Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas and Diller & Scofidio and that if we only had
more buildings by them and by other architects, then we would all be living in paradise.
Well, I like these architects too, or at least a lot of what they do, but I dont buy this way of
seeing the world, not for a minute. To believe that the public is crying out for Zaha Hadid and
most of the landscape is built at a less ambitious level only because the evil forces have foisted
this awfulness on us is sort of like saying that everybody really wants to see nothing but the
movies at the Angelika or the Film Forum, and the only reason we have Steven Spielberg and the
films that get shown at Loews is because the studios have forced this awful stuff on an unwilling
public. Popular taste isnt really popular taste, in other words it is the horribleness that has been
forced down peoples throats by the evil forces.
Well, there is a nice faith in popular taste and popular judgment, I have to grant that. If only it
were true. The reality is that popular taste is a very complex business, and it depends something
on the marketplace, something on pure economics of scale, something on larger social and
cultural forces, and something on individual upbringing and background. The critic has to wend
his way through the complicated thickets of all of these various factors, and it is his or her
obligation, I think, to be respectful of popular taste and the things that shape it while not
pandering to it, either. If nothing is gained by pretending that Rem Koolhaas is the messiah or
that Zaha Hadid represents the will of the people, nothing is gained by saying that Wal-Mart
represents the will of the people, either or any of the other mediocrities with which our
landscape is cluttered.
Let me say again that I dont mean to make any particular architect a target here; the fact of the
matter is that I wrote with great enthusiasm about Zaha Hadids new Contemporary Art Center in
Cincinnati; although I had some reservations about it, I found it a tremendously exciting and
energizing presence in the cityscape, and exactly right as a statement for the public realm, and
vastly more workable as a building than I had expected it to be. I just dont like to see buildings
like this viewed uncritically, in an a priori way, by critics who are basically so in love with the
notion that architecture exists to upset the equilibrium that they can see nothing wrong in it if it
does this. Actually I liked the Cincinnati building in part because it upset the equilibrium less
than I had expected it to. But I also wrote recently this week, in fact about the new Time
Warner Center at Columbus Circle in New York, a big, mixed-use skyscraper project in which

the point isnt avant-garde architecture at all, or even anything about architectural theory, but the
whole question of the public realm and public projects and urban design and how you make a
city and what kind of values you embrace when you build a second-rate behemoth like this.
In any event, let me get back to something I touched on a moment ago, which is Ground Zero
and the extraordinary events that have occurred there. If, as I said before, every architectural
object is both an aesthetic thing and a political thing, we could not see this more clearly than in
the debate going on about Lower Manhattan, and we also see there the overwhelmingly powerful
public passion about larger urbanistic issues and their connection to the work of individual
architects. This is not the moment to re-tell this entire complicated story, which would fill an
entire separate evening anyway. But I would like to think for a moment about the role of the
press here, and how it has played out.
It is a striking thing in the history of architectural writing, and I say writing rather than criticism
here, because there has been relatively little criticism, and quite a lot of writing. Never has
architecture been more in the public eye. When the New York Post puts pictures of buildings and
plans on the front page, and pushes one design over another one, and when an architectural
competition, or pseudo-competition exercise, becomes a public event that people seem to watch
with the passion of the World Series, as they did earlier this year, something extraordinary has
happened. As someone who has written about architecture for his entire life and often felt like a
sports writer who is assigned to the lacrosse beat, I was suddenly covering the Super Bowl. It
was a most remarkable thing.
Was it good or bad for architecture, or good or bad for architecture criticism? Well, you have to
believe it was good for architecture, unless you truly think that the public should have nothing to
do with the ultimate public art, and that would be a position of the ultimate hypocrisy, at least for
a critic to take. But of course there is no free lunch, and in this wild orgy of public interest in
Ground Zero has come some wretched journalism, some insane celebrity pandering, lots of
politicking, and plenty of disingenuous and sometimes outright dishonest criticism. There is also,
of course, plenty of deeper risk. Popularity carries with it huge pressures, pressures that are often
hard to resist, to bring things to the lowest common denominator. Great art, or at least great new
art, is rarely exceedingly popular, for the very reason that it is too challenging for most people to
accept. In the new popularity of architecture, we risk watching complex ideas reduced to simple
pablum, as we risk watching subtle forms reduced to strident ones.
Along the same lines is the question of process. In our current value system of public policy,
when we have tried to go in the opposite direction from the dictatorial and closed process by
which the original World Trade Center was planned, we risk indulging in the fallacy that an open
and totally inclusive process will automatically yield the best result. Planning may be a
democratic act, but it is not only democracy, and you do not design by referendum. It is
wonderful to see that people care enough to want to indicate a preferential design, and of course
it was a good thing when, in the middle of 2002, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation
was forced to retreat and withdraw its six widely reviled schemes for Ground Zero actually, six
variations on a single scheme and invite architects of more imagination to propose master
plans, instead. But once that happened, it is dangerous indeed to see the whole thing become a
popularity contest, as it often seemed to be.

The architects, of course, played along with this what else could they do? They were stuck in a
strange system not of their making, and they had to play the cards in their hands. What bothered
me far more than anything any of the architects did was the way some of the press promoted
shamelessly, and often with strange agendas. There were leaks and innuendos and reports about
certain architects questionable pasts, as if they were political figures. It was a time and I am
speaking of last February when there was a desperate need for real architecture criticism, to get
the focus onto the work itself and away from the mudslinging. Unfortunately we got very little of
that from critics, some of whom were quite busy slinging mud themselves.
I have to say that I was glad at that point that I was no longer working for a daily newspaper,
since the pressure to keep generating copy was often antithetical to the goals of criticism, which
requires some degree of thoughtful distance and perspective. It was also troubling that most of
the daily press covered the Ground Zero story in bits and pieces, with someone writing about the
politics and someone else about the money and someone else about the architecture, as if you
could really separate any of these things. Never, as I said a moment ago, has there been a more
vivid demonstration of how these things are inevitably intertwined and interdependent, for better
or for worse, and to deny this by writing only about politics or only about aesthetics is to miss an
opportunity to explain how the world really works, if in more exaggerated form here than usual.
I am perhaps a little na-ve here, and dont take what I am about to say as any kind of capitulation
to the forces of evil here, but the fact of the matter is that idealism and architecture have had a
seat at the table, so to speak, in this complex drama, and that in itself is remarkable. Architecture
doesnt count for everything it never has, and it never will. But there has been a kind of
architecture card that has gotten played here, first by the Lower Manhattan Development
Corporation in the middle of 2002 when it issued its call to architects, and later by Vinoly and
Libeskind during the shootout month of February, and since then by Libeskind himself as he has
tried, sometimes in vain, to save aspects of his design and to keep himself actively involved in it.
As I have worked on a series of long pieces about this whole process for The New Yorker, I
think I have gotten closer to this business than almost anyone who is not a participant in it, but I
still cannot tell you how it is going to end up, or whether the architecture card is ultimately an
ace of spades, or just a three of diamonds. I just know that there is more public engagement in
architectural questions here than I have ever seen in New York, and I have to believe that this is
ultimately a positive thing.
I hope that the public passions about Ground Zero will yield a great work of architecture,
although it is far too soon to be sure, as I said, and I could construct a scenario in which it would
seem sure to happen, and another one, equally believable, that would show you that it is
impossible. But whatever the outcome at Ground Zero, the key lesson of architecture at the
beginning of the 21st century is simply that it is there, more conspicuous, more central, more
essential and more a part of our culture, than it has ever been before. Im not sure the average
person has ever been stupid, but for a long time it was fair to say that he or she was blind, or
close to it. Now, people see, and see more, and better, than ever before, and they care about what
they see. The first revolution of architecture getting people to pay attention to it has been
won. Now the question is what architecture critics can do with that victory, and how they can
make sure that the legacy of this is neither complacency nor cynicism, and that architecture
remains a creative, potent and challenging force in our culture.

Frank Lloyd Wright at Hull House: On "The


Art and Craft of the Machine"
Hull House Museum, Chicago, IL
March 1st, 2001
Good evening. I am honored to be here, and to be a part of this extraordinary commemoration of
what is, in some ways, one of the seminal events in twentieth-century architecture. By describing
"The Art and Craft of the Machine" in such terms I dont mean to suggest that Wrights lecture
deserves to be remembered more than his buildings; it doesnt, and for all its power, it isnt as
good as most of his buildings. But there is a lot to say about it, and there could not be a better
time to hear it again, and not just because it was given exactly a century ago.
Most of us remember Wrights lecture for its central point: Wright argued in "The Art and Craft
of the Machine" against the hand-crafted aesthetic of Ruskin and William Morris, and in favor of
an architecture that would use the machine as an aesthetic inspiration. He denounced what he
considered the hypocrisy of embracing technology as a modern means to achieve a traditional
end, which is to say he didnt think much of using machines to make classical columns or Gothic
arches. Wright believed passionately that the machine somehow had to shape the aesthetic as
well; it had to be a generator of architectural form. Architecture would not only have to be made
differently in the age of the machine; it was essential that it look different, too. While Wright
despised the literal revivalism of those architects who struggled, or perhaps we might say
pretended, to build in the true Gothic mode, without supporting steel and other manifestations of
contemporary technology, he was every bit as dismissive, or maybe more so, of those who used
modern techniques and then hid them behind Gothic or classical or Georgian facades. Better not
to build a skyscraper at all than to build one like the Wrigley Building or the Tribune Tower,
Wright might have said.
Anyway, we all know that. Wright said it with great force, as you have heard, and in so doing he
set the tone for numerous modernist theorists of a very different stripe who would follow him
Le Corbusier most famously, but also Gropius, Peter Behrens, Antonio SantElia, and others.
Each of them in his own way romanticized the machine, and connected the future of architecture
to our ability to evolve a new aesthetic based on the machine. It is striking that Wright came first,
but maybe more important to observe that the notion of the machine aesthetic would come, in the
years following this lecture, to find a more natural home in Europe than in the United States,
among the utopian socialist intellectuals and the futurists who would develop a strain of
modernism significantly different from Wrights own. I think we can take this point further and
say that "The Art and Craft of the Machine" is both quintessentially Wrightian and very different
from what the usual message Wright tried to convey in much of his rhetoric. Its quintessentially
Wrightian in its glorious, overblow rhetoric, of course, in its arrogance, in its heavily moralizing
tone, and in its certainty that we were in a new age, an age of cosmic change, an age that was

profoundly different from all that had come before. You dont have to study the talk very
carefully to pick all of this up.
But there is a subtle difference between "The Art and Craft of the Machine" and many of the
themes Wright based his architecture, and so much of his other rhetoric, on, and thats what I
would like to talk about for a moment not how this great lecture is the same as what Wright so
often said, but how it is different. You dont hear a lot in "The Art and Craft of the Machine"
about the American passion for flowing, open space, for moving out across the land, for breaking
away from the city passions with which Wright identified completely. You all know of
Wrights constant attempt to present himself as the architect of democracy, as the generator of an
aesthetic that related directly to the American tradition, and would itself further and enhance the
democratic idea. His "Autobiography" is full of this, as are so many of his writings, which talk of
the glories of simplicity, of the sense of repose, of the dignity and ease that would come from the
flowing space and clean, earth-hugging lines of his Prairie Houses.
"The Art and Craft of the Machine" is, as you have heard, a radical statement, and I think it is
important to remember here the extent to which, much of the time, Wright was not so radical at
all in fact, he was oddly conservative. He believed passionately in the traditional family, in
traditional roles, and even though he broke brazenly with social convention early in this century
when he left his wife and children and took up with the wife of a client, he never shook off a
quality of solid, Midwestern conservatism. Wright created radical new forms to accommodate to
relatively traditional social patterns. The family, and the symbols that embraced it, were all. The
primacy he gave to the hearth, to the dining table, to rooms for playing music in his houses
underscores this. Taliesin, his own home in Wisconsin and Arizona, may have been a little bit
like a commune, but it was a hierarchical commune, and a commune where Saturday night
dinners were black tie. This was a man who did not want to challenge the social order his
goal was to make a new form of architecture to protect it. Indeed, Wright believed that the
historical styles, the traditional architecture that surrounded him during his nineteenth-century
upbringing, was antithetical to the democratic spirit of the United States, and that his Prairie style
would express the American spirit better than anything else had thus far been able to do. The last
thing in the world that Wright wanted to do was rethink the order of the world.
Of course, some of this certainly the words in Wrights "Autobiography" came later. The
Wright we have just heard tonight, the Wright of "The Art and Craft of the Machine," sounds, in
substance if not in tone, more like the European modernists who were in so many ways his
opposites. They were utopians, who were driven by a social dream, on a vision of a very
different society. Indeed, for some of them the new architecture was but a means to a new kind
of society: whereas Wright designed new to protect the old order, architects like Le Corbusier
and Gropius designed new to overthrow the old order.
Of course it is true that for all their differences, all of these architects, all of these early
modernists of every stripe, shared a belief that architecture had a power a power to affect
social well-being, whether it was to make a new and changed society, as the Europeans wanted,
or to preserve and protect and energize an older one, as Wright sought. We certainly see this in
"The Art and Craft of the Machine." In all of Wrights moralizing and bombast, he is nothing if
not passionate about the notion of art, and architecture, as having the power to transform society.

And yet it is something of a paradox that Wright himself, for all his brilliance and daring as a
formalist, and for all the magnificence of his architecture, was, as Ive suggested, in certain ways
a rear-guard figure, to whom architectural creativity was in many ways a means of saving the
world as it was. Wright believed as the European modernists did that we were in a new age; that
was central to the thesis of "The Art and Craft of the Machine." But at the same time, he believed
in a kind of status quo, oddly enough. It was, in a sense, motherhood and apple pie he just
wanted the apple pie baked in a new kind of stove and served on a new kind of dish, but in the
belief that they would therefore taste all the better. He was certain that the American values he
cherished were worth saving but he was even more certain that this could not be done if we
kept producing the traditional, revivalist architecture that had been the bread-and-butter of
American building for most of the nineteenth century.
I realize that some of the paradox of Wright the radical/Wright the conservative is a matter of
ends and means Wright believed that we needed radical means to protect conservative ends.
Maybe that is the clearest way to put it. The Europeans, of course, wanted radical means to
achieve radical ends, and that was the difference between them. Its worth saying also that
Wright was not yet thirty-four when "The Art and Craft of the Machine" was delivered, and his
youth shows. Its not that he mellowed later, its more that his view of himself as a kind of
American prophet seems to have grown, and pushed away the love of the machine. In 1901 we
see a Wright who was already fully sure of himself, fully certain that architecture could solve the
problems of the world and that he could solve the problems of architecture. The sense of the new
century as representing a completely new age led him, perhaps, to a kind of bombast that
obscured his underlying conservatism.
There is no simple explanation to this puzzle how it is that Wrights most important early
statement seems to take him in a direction more consistent with the modernists who were to
become, in many ways, his antagonists, the Europeans who history has come to associate, far
more clearly than Wright himself, with the notion of an architecture of the machine age. Of
course one is tempted to take from all of this that Wright was the fount of all modernist thinking,
including that which differed somewhat from his own, and that "The Art and Craft of the
Machine" proves a kind of common ancestry for much of the twentieth centurys architectural
theorizing, which becomes all traceable back to Wright. Thats a little farfetched, and I dont
think even the most ardent Wrightians would buy this view entirely. But its not entirely wrong,
either. Yet its certainly not a subtle point or an altogether accurate one; we know that the
streams of modernist thought are vastly more complex than that, and that the European theorists,
many of whom were acquainted with Wrights work and with his writings, nonetheless hardly
derived all their ideas from him.
When I re-read Wrights lecture in preparation for tonight, something else about it struck me, a
passage that I hadnt remembered. After he finished going on about John Ruskin and William
Morris, Wright started talking about Gutenberg, the inventor of movable type, and he made the
most 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 to Victor Hugo in
this point, of course, who made a somewhat similar observation in "The Hunchback of Notre
Dame," but Wrights way of expressing this point is interesting. Before printed books, Wright

said, "all the intellectual forces of the people converged to one point architecturee.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 once
printing arrived, Wright says, "Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself, not only
more resisting than architecture, but still more simple and easy. Architecture is dethroned.
Gutenbergs letters of lead are about to supersede Orpheuss letters of stone. The book is about
to kill the edifice," he concluded, here reworking Victor Hugos phrase literally.
Never mind whether Wrights theory is right or wrong, or the fact that it 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 is wildly overstated, full of
Whitmanesque hyperbole. But for all of that, it is still 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, and that is pretty radical
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, as you know the iconography of the Gothic
cathedrals is the most potent example, but so, too, with Greek temples and with most classical
architecture although I think Wright was thinking not only in such literal terms, but also in the
idea that the architectural experience itself, the creation of structure and space, was a form of
communication, and a form 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 Wrights notion that its
power was diminished by the way in which the printing press allowed an alternative means for
ideas to become widely disseminated is a compelling thought.
Wright went on to suggest that the printing press so weakened architecture that after the Middle
Ages architecture had no choice but to devolve into historical replication in Wrights view, as
you may remember, the Renaissance was nothing but an elaborate pageant of classical copying.
Wrights theory was that since architecture had been robbed by the printing press of its role of
conveying human thought, it turned into a poor echo of itself, an effete copy of its past, while
fresh ideas were expressed in books instead of buildings. And it only got worse, century by
century, Wright believed, until at the beginning of the twentieth century, when he was delivering
"The Art and Craft of the Machine," by which point architecture "is but a little, poor knowledge
of archeology," Wright said, and art, too, had become essentially a form of denial, a sentimental
grasping for the past. Now, it is easy to laugh at this, and indeed, some of what Wright had to say
was patently ridiculous. It isnt news to observe that Frank Lloyd Wright had a lot of fun
deliberately misreading everything in architectural history from the Renaissance through the
Beaux-Arts. But lets stay focused on the machine itself, and on Wrights realizations about it,
which broke through his own wild rhetoric to some other, equally wild but I think vastly more
insightful rhetoric. Wright said of the machine that it was "invincible, triumphant, the machine

goes on, gathering force and knitting the material necessities of mankind ever closer into a
universal automatic fabric; the engine, the motor, and the battleship, the works of art of this
century!"
I love the phase "universal automatic fabric"; it almost makes me think of the Internet. Wright
certainly understood that all technology does, in a way, connect, and that it feeds upon itself. But
the real point here is that Wright was urging that we, in effect, take back the machine, claim it for
art and architecture that it is the reality of our time, as much as stone was the reality of the
fifteenth century. Others would say similar things later Le Corbusier most memorably, as Ive
already said, as well as the great Italian futurist SantElia but Wrights view of architecture as a
communications medium, and thereby vulnerable to the printing press, gives the idea of
accepting the machine a whole different meaning.
And now that almost all technology seems in some way to be about information, now that
technology and communication have become almost one and the same, it is difficult not to think
that the relationship between architecture and technology must be even more interdependent than
it was in the past. Wrights underlying thesis that the machine was not only a tool, but also an
aesthetic inspiration, even an aesthetic imperative has obvious analogies to what is going on
today with blobs and folded planes and everything else that can be said, symbolically or actually,
to reflect the shaping of architectural form through computers. There is no question that we are at
a moment of technological development as important as the dawn of the machine age, and that it
will have as significant an effect on architectural form. It has already begun to. And like the
architecture of the machine age, its effect will be felt in process, in materials, and in physical
appearance. And also like the architecture of the machine age, the effect of technology on the
way architecture looks will sometimes be a direct result of new processes and new materials, but
it will just as often be a result of imagined connections architecture that just sort of "feels"
digital, regardless of how it was derived, which is not so different from a lot of the International
Style architecture of the nineteen twenties and thirties that "felt" mechanical, even though it may
have been drawn as carefully as a Beaux-Arts rendering, and constructed as traditionally as a
Victorian church.
We are in an age as new, and as uncertain, and as frought with potential for architecture as the
machine age. We dont yet fully know what the digital age will mean for architecture, although
we already see, as we did in the machine age, a conflict between those who see new technologies
as just a set of tools that will make it easier to construct architecture that is more or less similar to
that which we have built before, and those who see new technologies as the basis for an entirely
new aesthetic, as Wright did a hundred years ago. There could not be a better time to look back
at "The Art and Craft of the Machine," because we now have a whole new kind of technology,
beyond the machine, and a whole new generation of architects who are seeing digital
technologies in the same way that Wright saw the machine as an inspiration. We have the same
sense that the world is never again going to be the same.
We arent likely to greet the digital age with rhetoric like what we have just heard in "The Art
and Craft of the Machine," and that is partly because not even the greatest architect of today has
Wrights ability to combine brilliant aesthetic invention with the tone of a fundamentalist
preacher. Its impossible to imagine Frank Gehry, or Peter Eisenman, or Greg Lynn, exorting us

all to save civilization with "The Art and Craft of Digital Architecture." I think we will move
into this new age more quietly than Wright brought us into the machine age. But we should make
no mistake, as we adjust to the digital age and as we struggle with the question of how much the
architecture we make now has a responsibility to embrace the technology of our time, that if we
decide it is liberating, not to say profound, for architecture to do so, that it was Wright, a hundred
years ago at Hull House, who showed us the way.

Does Architecture Matter? Thoughts on


Buildings, Design, and the Quality of Life
Fixed Income Forum, Chicago, IL
March 25th, 2004
Good evening. I recall Philip Johnson beginning a speech in Chicago some years ago by saying
how grateful he was to have been invited to Americas first city of architecture coming, that is
to say, as a representative of Americans second city, which in so many ways is what New York
has always been architecturally vis--vis Chicago. Architecture is one area in which we in New
York truly do have a second city complex toward Chicago not the other way around, as it is in
so many other realms. And for all that has happened over the years, little has changed in the
sense that those of us in New York, as well as the rest of the country, still have of Chicago as
being the essential city of American architecture. Chicago still looks like the city in which the
ethos of architecture remains potent, the city in which the presence of a powerful architectural
tradition combines with the coherence of a living architectural community.
Now I say this not to flatter Chicago, or to suggest that all is perfect here. It is not, and Im
prepared to be a less than perfect guest and say something in a minute or two about what isnt as
good as it might be in this city. But first let me say something about the importance of the past in
Chicago, since it is everywhere present here in the Michigan Avenue area, down in the Loop,
but also all through the North Side, down on the South Side, out at Oak Park and River Forest
and Highland Park and Evanston. You cannot escape Chicagos architectural history Louis
Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Burnham, John Welborn Root, Mies van der Rohe, Myron
Goldsmith, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Helmut Jahn the names go on and on, and they are
the citys glory, and yet the greatness of Chicagos architectural heritage is, rather paradoxically,
sometimes also the citys problem today. For it leads many people architectural historians most
of all, but also local boosters of every stripe to romanticize the city, to discuss it as the apex of
American architecture, the way art historians of the Renaissance might discuss Florence as the
location of the ultimate flowering, as the place in which absolutely everything came together to
create something as close to perfection as the history of that time was ever going to permit. Well,
Chicago is not Florence, any more than the Chicago River is the Arno, or Soldier Field the
Duomo. Actually, the way Soldier Field has just been redone, maybe it is a little more like a

high-tech cathedral than ever before; it is certainly cutting-edge, as new in the realm of stadiums
as the Duomo once was in the realm of cathedrals. Maybe the analogy to Florence is not be
entirely off the mark, not only because the level of quality in the art that flourished in both cities
is so extraordinary, but also since some of the problems of these two cities are not so very
different. The very tightness of Chicago, the way in which this city functions as a mostly unified
architectural community, is something like what once existed in Florence, and while it is in many
ways a strength, it also has its downside. As Florence once was, Chicago can be insular, it can
look inward more than outward, and it can be preoccupied, sometimes even obsessive, about its
past. Chicago, at the end of the twentieth century, is not a city on the cutting edge. Chicago, for
all its greatness, is not the city in which the direction American architecture is now taking is
being set, in just the way that Florence, for all its greatness, is not where Italian art and
architecture and culture flourish now. The two cities look back at very different pasts that of
Florence is ancient, and the past that we so admire in Chicago comes largely from this century,
and the very end of the last one. Chicagos past is so recent that some of its most powerful
aspects its Miesian heritage come almost up to our own time. You cannot walk the streets of
Florence and meet the people who made it what it is, unless you know how to conjure up spirits.
But you can walk the streets of Chicago and meet some of the people who created the powerful
past, or the people who worked alongside of them many are still alive, or their colleagues and
immediate successors are.
Somehow that has not helped to make Chicago as much a center of innovation over the last
twenty or thirty years as it was in the late nineteenth century, and for much of the twentieth.
There is no question that the most important American architecture being created now is coming
out of Los Angeles, or New York, or from elsewhere in the world altogether. Now, there are still
notable works of architecture being produced in Chicago, and in fact I can think of three that
have been finished relatively recently that might even be said to be important enough to attract
international attention, something that new buildings in Chicago havent generally done for a
couple of decades. But of these three new projects Rem Koolhaass new student center at
Illinois Institute of Technology, Helmut Jahns new building on the same campus, and Carlos
Zapatas addition to Soldier Field only one, Jahns, is by a Chicago architect. The other is from
an international celebrity architect based in Rotterdam, and the third, the stadium, is by a Boston
architect.
The biggest news made by a Chicago architect lately involves, as it so often does, a dead
architect in this case Mies van der Rohe, and the dramatic story by which Miess extraordinary
Farnsworth House, one of the greatest houses of the twentieth century truly, a near equal to
Frank Lloyd Wrights Fallingwater in my view was purchased for roughly seven million
dollars in an auction at Sothebys last December by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
The Trust rescued the house, which other potential buyers wanted to dismantle and move away,
and it plans to open it as a public museum beginning this May. It is a triumphant story, and an
absolutely wonderful one but, as I said, it is history again, not about Chicagos future, but only
its past. Now, its true that the rescue of the Farnsworth House by the National Trust serves as a
welcome reminder that modern architecture is now itself history, which is why it is so important
that the Trust is doing right by Chicagos heritage. I hope that the Farnsworth House will end up
being as visited as Frank Lloyd Wrights great Home and Studio in Oak Park, even though, being
in a funny little town sixty miles away from the Loop, it is not as easy to get to. It is every bit as

great a piece of the American architectural legacy. But it does not have too much to do with the
question of architecture in our own time, and what potential it holds.
Not that many years ago, Chicago was one of the only places in the United States, and surely the
only major city, in which the names of architects were as well known to the average intelligent
citizen as the names of novelists or pianists or painters which is to say not as well known as
athletes, surely, but celebrated figures nonetheless. Now, however, what was once true only of
Chicago is true of almost our entire country, as we have more and more architecture of note, in
more and more places, produced to serve an increasingly visually literate public. Last year I
visited a new museum in Cincinnati by Zaha Hadid, who just won the Pritzker Prize,
architectures highest honor; Los Angeles recently dedicated an extraordinary new orchestra hall
by Frank Gehry; Daniel Libeskind has designed the master plan for Ground Zero; there are new
buildings going up in this country by Norman Foster, Jean Nouvel, Tadao Ando, Santiago
Calatrava, Fumihiko Maki, Richard Rogers, Toshiko Mori, Rem Koolhaas and on and on. I am
most astonished at the extent to which the fascination for name-brand architecture has even
moved beyond its traditional realm of cultural institutions, universities and houses for the rich,
and into the sphere of commercial buildings. Real-estate developers now want apartment towers
by Calatrava, office buildings by Robert A.M. Stern, hotels by Jean Nouvel and shopping centers
by Daniel Libeskind. They have come to realize that architecture is a marketing tool in itself
that the name of the architect can have as much impact on the price of apartments as the number
of closets.
This is partly a function of a strong economy, but it is much more than that. We live in an age in
which we have come to expect a much more sophisticated and visually and emotionally engaging
public realm, and even a downturn in the economy is not going to stop that. It may slow the pace,
but it will not turn us back from what I believe is a profound cultural shift the shift toward a
visual culture.
We are in the age of architecture, and that is not going to change in the short term, whatever the
Dow Jones is doing. Since not long after Frank Gehrys extraordinary Guggenheim Museum in
Bilbao, Spain, opened in 1997, people have talked, at least implicitly, about the Bilbao effect
about the way his great museum led to a rebirth of excitement about great buildings and their
potential to awaken people to the experience of architecture in a broader way. Of course Gehrys
building, transforming event though it was, did not emerge all by itself, with no connection to the
culture. It represented a kind of culmination of years of moving toward an increased willingness
to see architecture as the basis for emotional experience, an increased willingness to celebrate
expression and invention, not to mention the creative power and possibility inherent in new
technologies. Gehry summed up all of these forces and put them together into a great work that,
in and of itself, had the ability to push things even farther, and as with all great art, we could
truly say that the world was somewhat different after it was created from the way it had been
before.
But Bilbao, and the buildings that preceded it and followed it in what we might call the category
of New High-Visibility Architecture With Emotional Impact not a very catchy name for a
style, but thats all right, because Im not trying to name a style but discuss a social attitude
anyway, Bilbao and so many of the buildings that have captured the public imagination came

about, at least in part, not only because of their architects, and not only because for a while we
were living in some lush economic times. We also had, and still have, a generation of clients who
were better-educated and more visually literate than the previous generation. They have eyes,
they look, and they care about what they see, and that leads them to demand architecture that will
excite them. And the more of it that gets built, the more the constituency for architecture grows.
The age of architecture, if we can call it that, comes about in part because of architecture itself;
the more it is a presence, the more there is a demand for it.
And thus we have not only Gehrys Disney Hall in Los Angeles, an even greater building than
Bilbao, but Tadao Andos Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth and Zaha Hadids
Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, as I mentioned a moment ago; and also Tod Williams
and Billie Tsiens Folk Art Museum in New York and Raimund Abrahams Austrian Cultural
Center in New York and Norman Fosters Swiss Re Tower in London and Bernard Tschumis
architecture school at the University of Miami and Richard Meiers apartment towers on the
Hudson River in New York and that is only the beginning. In an age in which the board of
Lincoln Center hires Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio to redesign the centers public plazas, when
MIT decides that it wants the calling card of its campus to be a series of conspicuous works of
architecture by the likes of Frank Gehry and Steven Holl, and when the Port Authority of New
York commissions Santiago Calatrava to design a new transit station for Lower Manhattan, there
seems to be a certain inevitability of architecture as the preferred means for institutions to put
themselves on the map today. Organizations that were once resistant to architecture now seem to
consider having a notable building (a "signature building," to use that somewhat cloying phrase)
to be an essential part of their public identity.
And it is not just architecture, but every aspect of design that is benefiting from this new visual
literacy, from this new prevalence of design quality. Look right down Michigan Avenue from
this hotel at Crate & Barrel, or at Ikea or Pottery Barn or the Gap or Target and you will see a
level of design quality being offered in the mass market that is beyond anything that has ever
existed. Once, if you cared about high-quality design, you had to shop at Design Research or the
Museum of Modern Art store or even more rarefied places, and the goods to be had were special,
hard to find, and generally expensive. Now, it is altogether different, and I continue to believe
that this is the great design story of our time the democratization of design, the migration of
quality design from an elite segment of the market to the mass market, or almost to it.
We are now at a moment when a dream that has existed since the early part of the 20th-century is
actually being fulfilled. This is the dream of seeing modern design become accessible to the
masses, and even sought by them the dream that energized the Bauhaus, that drove the creators
of that great German institution whose name is synonymous with modern design to create what
they did, even though their own work was largely labor-intensive, much more craft-dependent
than truly industrial, and rarely available to or even sought by the great masses of people. But
they believed that there was a good to be served by the presence of quality modern design in the
household environment, not to mention of course in the design of the house itself, and they
dreamed of the moment when good modern design would be available to everyone at a decent
price. Well, that moment has now come. Its here. Its in the stores that I mentioned, and plenty
of others. And we have seen a remarkable shift in the level of taste in general in this period, too
think, for a moment, about the last time you saw a television for sale that had a fake-wood

formica cabinet. Think about the last "Mediterranean" console "entertainment center" you saw in
the same store. Think about how long its been since you saw dark wood "Mediterranean"
kitchen cabinets, or avocado kitchen appliances. Look at the design of stoves, microwaves,
stereo systems, computers. They vary in quality, but there is a floor, a level below which none of
them sink, and it is higher than the average for design of consumer objects was just a generation
ago.
We dont tolerate schlock in quite the level we once did. I think there are several reasons for this,
all of which probably had to occur together. One is the rise in visual literacy I have mentioned, a
generation that is better-educated and more inclined to look than its parents were, even though
this is also a generation more inclined toward symbols of status than its parents were, too. If I am
going to be completely honest I have to admit that the guy who drives a BMW or an Audi whose
parents drove an Oldmobile is not doing that only because he knows the Audi looks better he is
also doing it because of the status that ascribes to that name, and now that status is available to,
and sought by, a far broader segment of the population than it once was.
But lets put that factor aside for the moment, and add another one, which is the incredible rise of
technology which has put a whole new generation of objects in front of all of us to a degree
never imagined a generation ago; it is hard to design a new kind of object to look like an old one,
even though they tried that for years with televisions, I admit. But it seemed harder somehow to
get away with that with computers; youll notice that IBM never tried to pass off a rosewood
Formica PC on all of us. Look at Apple products, for example, and how cutting edge they have
all been.
If the democratization of design is something that modern design has always wanted or at least
has said it has always wanted it is not without its drawbacks. Like the old Chinese curse, "may
your wish be granted," designs wish has been granted, and now let me tell you of the problems
that come along with this. First, along with democratization comes homogenization; along with
the quality of The Gap comes a sameness, a pushing of everything toward a common
denominator. Yes, that common denominator is a lot better than the average we saw 25 or 30
years ago but in its relentless sameness, in the way in which all of this fine stuff is now massproduced everywhere, we run the risk in design, as we do in so many other areas of our culture,
of squeezing out individual voices. Eccentric design, individual design, innovative design these
are harder things to spot right now, they are harder things to create, they are harder things to
establish in the marketplace. It continues to exist somewhat at the high end, but only the very
high end, as any one of you who have ever designed a custom home or apartment know. The
minute you move away from the very highest economic bracket, you are safer at Crate & Barrel.
Everything pushes toward the middle a middle that is better than it once was, but at a price to
the design diversity of our culture.
What does all of this have to do, in the end, with architecture, and with the making of civilized
cities? The loss of specialness of place, individuality and distinction of place, has a lot to do with
this, and I worry, even as I recognize how much better the average place we build now is than
the ones we built even a few years ago, about the homogenization of places, the pushing toward
the middle, as I said. But there is another danger, too, in the ubiquitousness of design now, and
that is that we can all become, in a sense, numbed by too much design around us, by the sense

that it is all too familiar, and that we need what are, in effect, higher and higher levels of design
intensity to respond. We become, in a sense, increasingly eager for the stimulation of a quick
visual fix; wanting architecture to be noticed at all costs means that we may find ourselves
falling for the architectural equivalent of the tarted-up blonde rather than the brunette whose
charms are more subtle, but more sustaining.
Sometimes, as in Gehrys best work, instant allure does not preclude deeper, more long-lasting
pleasures, but that is not always the case, and there are times when I suspect we will fall prey to
the heady turn-on of a glamourous building and pass up something that may be a more profound
work of architecture but is not nearly as exciting at first glance. And as we become more and
more accustomed to the idea that architecture is supposed to give us a kind of emotional high, are
we not at risk of needing more and more of it, all the time, upping the ante as buildings that once
would have excited us now become routine? In the end, this may turn out to be the real way we
pay a price for our new fixation that we need each piece of architecture to be more and more
different, to make a louder and louder statement, to attract our interest. (When every building is
extraordinary, as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown once said, then havent they all
become ordinary?)
To say this is to risk spoiling the party, and a wonderful party it has been. I dont mean to do this,
since I believe, as I said, that the age of architecture is more good than not if I didnt believe
that, I think I should probably find another line of work. But I want only to put architecture in its
proper place, and not ask of it things that it cannot deliver. Of course architecture is not life and
death. It is not as important as enlightened public policy, or as a healthy economy. It doesnt
solve AIDS, or cure cancer. It is not bread on the table, and it is not justice in the courtroom. It is
always important to remember that a great court does not guarantee just and fair laws, just as a
great school building does not in and of itself teach people, though it may provide a better
environment for teaching people. And we have all known for a very long time that a great
religious edifice does assure the purity of the soul.
But does that mean that great architecture cannot, in its own way, have a profound and subtle
effect on the quality of life? The truth is that there is no way to tangibly measure the effect of
architecture on our lives, and there is no way even to be certain that it can make a demonstrable
impact on the nature of a community. Dont think Im going to follow up on what Ive just said
with some platitudes and homilies about how wonderfully architecture improves the quality of
life, because the fact of the matter is that I am not sure how much it always does. I will leave the
certainty on that subject to Frank Lloyd Wright. Im afraid we cant necessarily count on
architecture to do all this wonderful stuff, however much we may want it to, and even if we have
experienced it ourselves, as so many of us in this room surely have. We know that sometimes
architecture really does deliver in the way we want it to, to change lives for the better, but at the
same time we have to recognize that a lot of the time it doesnt change lives, and it doesnt even
provide for everyone the transcendent lift of brilliance that a great aesthetic experience can bring.
But the point I want to make right now is a little bit different. I dont want to think of
architecture as only a luxury that we fight to protect as an aesthetic experience that we cherish
like art and music, but a thing that we cannot afford in times of stress and difficulty. I think that
architecture is more essential, not less essential, in times of difficulty, that it can rise to its

greatest potential and give us the most in times of national difficulty, since it can 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 preserving older ones, and that building new was a way of affirming a belief
in the future.
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 in
the power of imagination, and in the ability of society to continue to create anew. The case for
architecture, if we are going to call it that, doesnt rest solely on the experience of being in
remarkable and wonderful buildings those places that, as the great architectural critic 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 Beethoven or Picasso adds to our culture. To strive to make more of them is the highest
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.

Design Lessons from the Late 20th Century


Seattle Design Center, Seattle, WA
March 2nd, 2000
Good morning. I am delighted to be here, and to say something about the state of architecture
and design at this moment in our continually surprising cultural history. What I want to talk
about this morning is not, at least on the surface, about great issues, and it is not about process. It
is about little things, about minor objects of the sort we see every day and often do not give a
second thought to, in part because these things give us a wonderful way of measuring the temper
of the moment, telling us something about the mainstream, something about where American
taste is right now, and about what implications all of this will have for the future of business.

Here we are inside this design center, in the middle of one of the better American downtowns, in
the middle of one of the more sophisticated American cities. What I am about to say has little to
do with any of these things, and in some ways it is probably the worst possible thing to say here,
since my thesis is that at the beginning of the 21st century we can take the pulse of design in our
culture better outside these doors than inside them maybe on Fifth Avenue at The Gap, or at
Pottery Barn, or off at the Banana Republic. Im not sure there is a Gap on Fifth Avenue in
Seattle, but it is a safe enough assumption almost anywhere now that there is, so Ill make it.
The stuff to be sold at these places, and at numerous others like them is nothing short of
astonishing. No, it is not dazzlingly innovative, and no, it does not change the history of design,
but it does show us, firmly and absolutely, how much the mainstream of American taste has
shifted in the last generation, how much there has been a movement toward quality and
sophistication. We are witnessing an incredible phenomenon that I call the democratization of
design the movement of design from the province of the elite, down to if not quite mass taste,
then certainly to mainstream taste. Pottery Barn, as I said; its companion stores WilliamsSonoma and Hold Everything; its rival Crate & Barrel; The Gap, which is trying to move everso-tentatively into the purveying of objects as well as clothing and which sets an example of
its taste in its store designs every one of these places represents a sea change in the way in
which the average person in this country now encounters design, and perceives it. Suddenly,
design is accessible to all. It has become a mass commodity. It is available everywhere, and at a
reasonable level of quality.
Of course what you find at Crate & Barrel arent the finest things our age is capable of
producing, but that is not the point. The point is that not so many years ago, the people who shop
at Crate & Barrel had no place to go for modern design of quality at affordable prices. There
were a few elite places Design Research on 57th Street in Manhattan and in Cambridge
marked a kind of beginning of the movement toward a broader audience, as did Bonniers on
Madison Avenue but they were still fairly rarified places, and by and large quality modern
design was not a mass product. There was Knoll and Stendig and ICF and a few other to-thetrade manufacturers of modern furniture of high quality, but little else. If you had modern tastes
and a modest pocketbook, you were pretty much out of luck. Oops, of course there was the
Museum of Modern Art, which in those days sold a few lamps and Aalto stools and things along
with books and postcards, giving its stamp of approval to certain objects, a kind of Good
Housekeeping seal, which it then proceeded to sell. This was design as religion, design as elitist
cult of uplift. But this, too, was minor in the scheme of things; in those days the objects at
MOMA were tucked behind the books; its significant that today, and for the last decade or so,
they have had their own large store across the street, overflowing with Museum-approved design
objects for sale.
A quick bit of history. The movement of serious design away from the province of an expensive,
exclusive elite began to change dramatically in the mid-1970s, with the coming of Conrans to
these shores, the American offshoot of Terence Conrans Habitat stores in England. In the 70s
we also saw the rise of many small shops in New York selling modern objects of serious design,
like Sointu and D.F. Sanders, both unfortunately now gone. Their demise, like that of Design
Research years before, I attribute largely to the movement of serious modern design to the realm
of mass merchandising when people like Conrans, and later Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel,

got interested, there was little hope for the small, independent seller of quality modern objects,
just as there is today little hope for the small, independent bookseller who faces competition
from huge superstores.
Now Im not here to waste your time talking about merchandising, but about something much
more important in its cultural implications. I think we are now at a moment when a dream that
has existed since the early part of the 20th-century is actually being fulfilled. This is the dream of
seeing modern design become accessible to the masses, and even sought by them. This is the
dream that energized the Bauhaus, that drove the creators of that great German institution whose
name is synonymous with modern design to create what they did. For even though their own
work was largely labor-intensive, much more craft-dependent than truly industrial, and rarely
available to or even sought by the great masses of people, they desperately wanted modern
design to be a mass product, dreaming of a moment when good modern design would be
available to everyone at a decent price. They fooled themselves into believing that it could be
such a thing in their time. It couldnt, and it wasnt. But it is one now.
That moment has now come. Its here. Bizarre as it sounds, the Bauhaus dream has been
fulfilled, more than half a century later, in places like the Gap. And we have seen a remarkable
shift in the level of taste in general in this period, too not just what gets sold in Pottery Barn,
but in the whole range of our consumer products. Think, for a moment, about the last time you
saw a television for sale that had a fake-wood formica cabinet. Think about the last
"Mediterranean" console "entertainment center" you saw in the same store. Think about how
long its been since you saw dark wood "Mediterranean" kitchen cabinets, or avocado kitchen
appliances. Look at the design of stoves, microwaves, stereo systems, computers. They vary in
quality, but there is a floor, a level below which none of them sink, and it is higher than the
average for design of consumer objects was just a generation ago. And think of the last truly
badly designed, badly made car you saw.
We dont tolerate schlock in quite the level we once did. Its not as simple as design meeting the
consumer design must lead the consumer just not so far ahead that he will not want to
follow. Once, there was a disconnect design was so far ahead that the average consumer
didnt pay any attention to it. Now, it is closer, and the consumer is following. This is helped by
the incredible rise of technology, which has put a whole new generation of objects in front of all
of us to a degree never imagined a generation ago; it is hard to design a new kind of object
without some sense of expressing newness, even though they tried that for years with televisions,
I admit. Ahh, dont we miss the Mediterranean entertainment consoles. But it seemed harder
somehow to get away with that with computers; youll notice that IBM never tried to pass off a
rosewood Formica PC on all of us.
Some of this may be that a younger generation of designers were producing these things, and
didnt want to stand for it themselves; IBM itself, of course, has a long track record as a
sophisticated patron of advanced product design, and wisely when it moved into the realm of
consumer products did not retreat from its traditional high standards. But of course they have a
lot to keep up with, given that Apple has consistently set high standards of design, that others are
beginning to bring colored computers to market, and that in the world of new technology, even
the laggards are doing decently, and designing to a more sophisticated standard than many

products met a generation ago. The iMac may or may not be your favorite computer, but as a
pure work of design as a moment in the cultural evolution of the design of consumer
products it is important.
Another reason for the widespread sense of visual literacy and that is exactly what it is, a
higher sense of visual literacy in this culture now another reason we are more visually literate
now is simply generational. I think that the baby boom generation has grown up to be more
visually sophisticated, by and large, than its parents were, and less comfortable with a certain
kind of cheap fakery. That doesnt mean that our generation isnt quite happy to have expensive,
serious fakery; 30-ish software zillionaries and 40-ish investment bankers have been keeping
certain architects in the money designing fake Shingle Style villas and Georgian mansions for
years now, and they will continue to. But we have come to associate in our culture a certain kind
of design with cheapness, and the visual sophistication of this generation now in its prime is
unwilling to tolerate it. Thus the design level, the visual sophistication, of household appliances
goes up, as I said, and of stereo equipment and telephones and computers and excercise
equipment and all of the other things that get put into that vast Georgian mansion. Younger
designers designing for younger consumers; together they raise the threshhold level of product
design. Once again, thats why the distinction between reaching consumers where they are
versus where you want them to be isnt as clear as it once was.
Another factor is the increasing globalization of the marketplace, and the realization that things
have to sell around the world. Also, the increasing visibility of design elsewhere, and a
willingness to buy into its allure. Not for nothing has the current trend toward simpler, sleeker,
cleaner kitchen appliances in this country been described in advertising with the breathless
phrase, "Eurostyle." In truth "Eurostyle" could mean anything, but we take it as a badge of
sophistication, and go from there. Of course since that awful dark wood stuff that used to fill
consoles and credenzas and kitchen cabinets was described as "Mediterranean," then maybe
Europe isnt the automatic positive association we think it is. What is actually interesting here is
that European associations have always been deemed to connote class, however the idea of class
is interpreted and we are lucky that right now, it is interpreted to mean a sophisticated,
reserved modern sleekness.
Even among people who seek ornate designs in their architecture, the clients who build the
sprawling fake Shingle-Style mansions, want sleek and sparely elegant stainless-steel appliances
in their kitchens. How I wish I had bought Sub-Zero stock 20 years ago but the real story is
not the popularity of that companys handsomely designed, status-symbol refrigerators and the
way they have become a symbol of the desire for a broader market to possess clean, sleek,
sophisticated design, but the way in which an even broader market is imitating it, as GE, Amana
and other mass manufacturers have now brought new refrigerator designs to the market that try
to compete with Sub-Zero. Sub-Zero sets the tone, it grows from being a niche product selling
high design to a nearly mainstream product, and then the mass manufacturers jump on the
bandwagon, producing similar designs to compete. High-end product becomes icon then
becomes model for the mass market: that is the sequence of events.
Another reason for the widespread sense of visual literacy and that is exactly what it is, a
higher sense of visual literacy in this culture now another reason we are more visually literate

now is simply generational. I think that the baby boom generation has grown up to be more
visually sophisticated, by and large, than its parents were, and less comfortable with a certain
kind of cheap fakery. That doesnt mean that our generation isnt quite happy to have expensive,
serious fakery; 30-ish software zillionaries and 40-ish investment bankers have been keeping
certain architects in the money designing fake Shingle Style villas and Georgian mansions for
years now, and they will continue to. But we have come to associate in our culture a certain kind
of design with cheapness, and the visual sophistication of this generation now in its prime is
unwilling to tolerate it. Thus the design level, the visual sophistication, of household appliances
goes up, as I said, and of stereo equipment and telephones and computers and excercise
equipment and all of the other things that get put into that vast Georgian mansion. Younger
designers designing for younger consumers; together they raise the threshhold level of product
design. Once again, thats why the distinction between reaching consumers where they are
versus where you want them to be isnt as clear as it once was.
Another factor is the increasing globalization of the marketplace, and the realization that things
have to sell around the world. Also, the increasing visibility of design elsewhere, and a
willingness to buy into its allure. Not for nothing has the current trend toward simpler, sleeker, A
couple of months ago, shortly before that great odometer we called Y2K turned over, I was asked
at a conference to rank the greatest architectural achievements of the twentieth century. I hardly
knew where to begin. With the revolutionary developments of modernism? With the last
powerful gasps of classicism? Was Penn Station in New York City greater than Fallingwater?
Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, the late works of Louis Sullivan, the
work of Louis Kahn. Rockefeller Center, the Hoover Dam, the Chrysler Building, the Empire
State Building. The interstate highway system not always very beautiful, and often seriously
destructive of our urban fabric, but in its sheer scope and ambition, perhaps better deserving of
being called a "project of the century" than any single building. While we are on the subject of
non-buildings, what about the Golden Gate Bridge, more beautiful and more powerful as symbol
than almost any building? Or the landfill-based Kansai Airport in Osaka, Japan, with its
buildings by Renzo Piano? We could go on and on, from architect to building to urban projects
to engineering projects, and this morning is not the moment to try to summarize the century.
What we can say, however and this is where it is relevant to us right now is that it was a
century of extraordinary scope, of remarkable architectural progress, both socially and
esthetically: a century in which architecture and urbanism have started with a strong belief in the
public realm, have appeared often to move away from it, and then seemed, at the end of the
century, to be coming back to it once again.
That is where the most ambitious architecture of our time, whatever its differences, comes
together. It all represents a powerful belief in the public realm, in the value of public places, both
symbolically and actually. This is critically important today, in a time when we have had so
many forces pushing us in the other direction. We have technology, creating an increasing pull
toward the virtual rather than the real and I dont refer here to the ways in which technology
is a tool for the making of architecture, but the way in which technology becomes an end in
itself, a means of substituting for real buildings in real places. I am no Luddite; I believe in the
power and the necessity of technology but I also believe that we have to be aware at every
moment of the effect of the great tools we have, and of how they change our perceptions of real
space and real places. Remember, too, that we live in a time when, as I said a few minutes ago

when talking about design, that the forces of homogenization are stronger than ever, which
means that, so far as architecture and urbanism are concerned, places are coming to look
increasingly like other places. The airports, the malls, the hotels, everything looks more and
more the same from Dallas to Minneapolis, from Atlanta to Cleveland. What, other than weather,
is there to create a sense of place today a sense that this place is special, and not like other
places?
Architecture, at its best, is one of the tools we have for doing this. But in the last quarter of the
twentieth century, we were hesitant to use this tool to its utmost, the way the three projects we
are looking at have done. We have built the same things, everywhere, churning them out faster
and simpler, with ever more banality. And when we have made special things, they have all too
often been not truly special, not the architecture that shows the highest potential of the building
art, but the glib fantasies that emerge out of the theme park. We are in an age that so values
fantasy environments that it has elevated the theme park to the status of urban icon. Now, I am
second to none in my admiration for the original Disneyland, and in my belief that it truly did
transform the way in which we looked at architecture, but I think its important to say that at the
end of the century, the theme park has now mutated itself into almost every aspect of our
architecture. We love fantasy and all of its easy, glib pleasures, so much that we often chose it
over reality.
Indeed, so much do we value the fantasy architecture of the theme park that it is easy to think
these days that artifice well executed is the only authenticity that matters or at least the only
authenticity our time is capable of creating. Certainly as technologies such as virtual reality
continue to develop, and the entertainment impulse and the urban impulse continue to blur, it is
hard not to think that authenticity in the architectural and urban environment is one of those oldfashioned values that holds no weight today. Sense of place? What an out-of-date, tired, stody
idea. What does that matter when we can see the Eiffel Tower at Walt Disney World, when a
new Las Vegas mega-hotel includes a reproduction of the New York skyline? Oh, and I forgot, if
you cant get to Disney World you can see another Eiffel Tower right there in Las Vegas, not to
mention a St. Marks Square and its campanile.
Yet as we ponder the impact of technology and entertainment on the city and on community,
there are some other points that have to be made. One is to raise the paradox and it is indeed a
paradox that the more technology we have, the more "connected" in one sense we are, the
more we seem to be distant from each other, the less we seem to be a community. We are all
wired, we are all instantly in communication with each other, and distances are as nothing. In a
flash you can talk to anyone, in even less time you can receive data, and in just a little bit more
time you can physically be anywhere in the world. And yet, at the same time we seem to be more
and more confirmed in our separate cultures. As we all connect, we seem to splinter, or to break
off into separate groups. This may be the age of connection, but it is also the age of
factionalization, the age of breaking apart.
What connotes common ground today? What value does our society even put in the notion of
common ground? The physical design of our communities often reflects this. Gated communities
and pseudo-theme park malls, cut off from the world, and people in their houses, sitting on their
computers. The architect Rem Koolhaas says that urban space is an antiquated notion, that public

space is over that the real public space now, the real city, is the virtual one, the one we make
through our computers.
I dont buy this, and I think that the projects we have been looking at are proof that society
doesnt buy it, either. That is why Ive been going on at such length about all of this, to make the
point that the greatest buildings of our time, things like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, represent
what I think is the beginnings of a kind of counter-trend. "Technology," Max Frisch said, is "the
knack of so arranging the world so you dont have to experience it." Exactly. Virtual reality has
its pleasures, but it is not reality. Long before cyberspace, technology was pushing us away from
public places and public experiences. Think back, if you will, to the great ages of urban life
at least we like to think of them as the great ages of urban life say, Paris in the 19th century.
"Street life" was a sign of the citys health; the public life was lived in cafes and on the streets,
and as you know a sophisticated person-about-town was even called a "boulevardier" a
presence on the boulevards. The term underscored how important the street, the public place,
was in the value system of the time. Contrast it with our phrase today, "street person" a
euphemism for the homeless, the down-and-out at the bottom of the social ladder.
Yet I do not believe that people will stop wanting to be with each other, however enticing the
technological imitations of communal experience can become. There will always be a place for a
true public realm. If there were not, it would have died long ago, for the car, the telephone, the
fax, the computer, the television, have already made it technologically out of date. We hold onto
it anyway, because we want it, and because people want to be together, they do not always want
to be apart, even if technology lets them. Even when they are lost in their own thoughts, as we so
often are when, say, we look at art in a museum, or when we experience the drama of a play in a
theater or a concert in a concert hall, there is something transforming about the communal nature
of the experience, about the way in which we take pleasure in sharing our private experiences
together, about the way in which this somehow ratifies and strengthens them. There has to be
some lesson in that.
But we also know that there is no experience in the world like that of space and form brilliantly
mastered that there is no sight in the world like the light of afternoon bouncing off the side
of a magnificent stone wall, and no sound in the world like that of the soft echo in a cathedral.
Louis Kahn once said "the sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building"
try reproducing that idea on the internet so someone can feel it with the depth and the power that
you do when you think of what Kahn meant, and connect it to your own experience.
What ties all of this together the democratization of design I talked about at the outset, the
homogenization of our urban environment, the triumph of a few great individual works of
architecture? The key lesson of design at the end of the 20th century is simply that it is there,
more conspicuous, more central, more essential and more a part of our way of life, as well as our
way of doing business, than it has ever been before. Im not sure the average person has ever
been stupid, but for a long time it was fair to say that he or she was blind, or close to it. Now, at
the end of the century, people see, and see more, and better, than ever before. The first revolution
of design just getting it out there has been won. People see, and they care about what they
see. Now the question is what we do with that victory, and how we can make sure that, as the
mass market continues to celebrate good objects and seems ever more to value good architecture,

that design is not entirely co-opted by its success that as we raise the bar, we continue to see,
and do not take architecture and design for granted, but keep thinking, again and again and again,
about how they can remain a creative, potent and challenging force in our culture, and improve
the quality of life.

Writing About Architecture


Yale School of Architecture
October 8th, 2007
Thank you. I am pleased to be here, presumably representing the critics side of the equation.
You know, Sir Henry Wotton, a frequent commentator on architecture, used to say that critics are
like brushers of noblemens clothes, according to Francis Bacon.
Not to be outdone, Lord Byron wrote that one might
_As soon seek roses in December, ice in June,
Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff
Believe a woman or an epitaph
Or any other thing thats false
Before you trust in critics._
Well, there you are. I would like to think that Byron was really talking about literary critics but
even so, the point is clear, which is that the critic is a complainer, a naysayer, or perhaps, even
less admirable, a flatterer that is surely Sir Henry Wottons implication but either way,
whether he praises or complains, he is not a figure who either creates real work or makes a
significant contribution to the theoretical dialogue. He is neither architect nor historian nor
theoretician.
While we are in the mode of quoting from eminent literary figures on criticism, let me add
Matthew Arnold, who defined criticism as a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the
best that is known and thought in the world a line I understandably prefer to Byron. This
actually gets to the heart of the point of criticism, I think, which John Donatich touched on in his
opening remarks when he asked about whether architecture criticism should have an educational
role, building the aesthetic sensibility of readers.
The answer to that question is yes. If it didnt sound hopelessly pompous, I would say that the
purpose of criticism in the general media is to create a better educated, more critically aware,
more visually literate constituency for architecture, and thus, presumably, increase societys

demand for good design. Now, since I dont want to sound hopelessly pompous, I wont say that.
And in fact I am not I am not here to advocate for the notion of the architecture critic as
missionary, believing that he or she is saving the world, or rescuing it from the sins of ignorance.
Still, at the end of the day, this whole notion has a certain amount of truth. It isnt the only reason
people like me do what we do, but it is a big part of it, and while it is important not to get carried
away with your importance, and to believe that you are there to provide enlightenment for the
unenlightened masses, it is equally important not to forget that a substantial part of what a critic
does is to educate. If you believe in education, and you believe in what we can call visual
literacy, and you believe that there is some way in which design can make the quality of life and
the quality of community better, then you have to believe that this is at least part of why design
criticism exists, and why it is essential that the profession not talk only to itself.
So a certain part of a critics job is to provide a kind of bridge, you might call it, between the
profession and the public, though bridge is probably the worst possible analogy, because the last
thing a critic should be providing is unfettered passage in both directions. We all know that
everything is not worthy of advocacy, and that the critic has to be a filter of ideas in other
words, to exercise judgment. If I were to take issue with anything that John said at the outset of
this session, it would be with his use of the word alternatively to set apart the critics
educational role and his or her activist role in the public sector, advocating for good projects and
doing what he can to prevent bad ones. This and the educational role are not mutually exclusive;
in fact, they go hand in hand. Without judgment, there is no criticism. And without some sense
of public advocacy, criticism is not grounded in the reality of our time, and forfeits a key
opportunity for meaning.
In a wise critic judgment is tempered by enthusiasm, although surely many critics could be
described more in terms of having enthusiasm tempered by judgment and I think the difference
between those two speaks more to the personality of individual critics rather than to any critical
or journalistic imperative anyway, whether it is judgment tempered by enthusiasm or
enthusiasm tempered by judgment, a critic needs both of these qualities to be of any value.
Both judgment and enthusiasm are ways of expressing love, and a critic who does not love his
field cannot last long in it. To love the thing whether we call it architecture, design, planning or
whatever and also to love what it means in other peoples lives, and not only your own is, I
think it is fair to say, a further prerequisite to functioning well as a journalistic critic. I dont
think this is inconsistent with exercising judgment; indeed, as I said before, judgment and
education go hand in hand, and are certainly parts of a critics role as a kind of interpreter, to
communicate his love of things and in so doing, instill love in others.
Now, I realize that all of this sounds a little touchy-feely, or maybe a little soft in the head. It
definitely feels distant from the notion that the point of this realm of journalism is to be tough,
and judgmental, and to expose the wretchedness of ninety-nine percent of what gets built in this
country, not to mention to expose the rampant inequities in redevelopment schemes, and the
horrendous lack of a housing policy in this country, or the failure of planners to create a viable
public realm in cities today. Well, yes, and the critic who is only an enthusiast risks being seen,
like Brownings duchess, as too soon made glad, too easily impressed. As I look back at what I

have done in _The New Yorker_ in the last couple of years, I think several of the negative pieces
whether on the Westin Hotel at Times Square by Arquitectonica, or the Astor Place
condominium by Gwathmey Siegel, or the Atlantic Yards project by Frank Gehry, or the Prada
store in Soho by Rem Koolhaas, which I compared unfavorably to the Toys "R" Us store in
Times Square all of these have had at least as much impact as the positive pieces Ive written.
Now, because _The New Yorker_ does not as a matter of policy try to cover everything
because we are selective, both for reasons of limited space and editorial judgment the decision
to write a negative piece has a special weight. We need to believe that there is something
important enough to say in a negative piece to justify giving a building one of the few precious
slots in the magazine for an essay on architecture. After all, we can always simply ignore a
building. We ignore most of them anyway.
But it is important that criticism not follow what we might call the Kindly Grandmothers Rule
in other words, if you dont have something nice to say, then dont say anything at all. At _The
New Yorker_, because we are so selective in what we write about, I am always a little worried
that people may think we are operating on the Kindly Grandmothers Rule of criticism, since
there are so many buildings we dont say anything about. Often we pass on them merely because
they do not present any significant issues that can inspire an interesting and provocative short
essay, not because I dont like them and dont want to say anything negative. Then again,
sometimes I pass on a building that I dont like because there isnt anything negative to say that
feels enlightening enough, or meaningful enough.
I wrote about the Astor Place building not to be critical of Charlie Gwathmey, an architect who I
generally admire, but to make a point about the glib and superficial modernist work now being
done by developers in the condo market, and about the way in which architecture has been
conscripted into the process of marketing. In some ways the Westin hotel piece which had as
its subhead, under the headline, Is this the ugliest building in New York? was written to
inquire into what constitutes vulgarity today, and also to make a similar point to the Gwathmey
piece, about the way in which architects with serious design intentions can become compromised
by the commercial development process.
I have not spoken much so far about ideology and theory, and that is intentional. I think a key
difference between an architect and a critic or a theoretician and a critic is that the former has
a right, even an obligation, to proceed from a theoretical viewpoint, and no such obligation exists
for a critic. Indeed, the opposite is true a critic should not believe that there is only one right
way to do things. That belief that there is only one correct solution to a problem strengthens
the work of the architect, and it enables the thinking of the theorist. You do not want an architect
who sees too many ways to go, and does not feel a passionate drive toward one of them. But that
worldview weakens the work of the critic, who needs to proceed from a pluralist position, at least
nominally, or he forfeits his ability to interpret, explain and judge the work that is before him.
But a critic has to stand for something, obviously. He cannot proceed from the view that
anything is acceptable so long as it is well done. So how do you combine an absence of rigid
ideology with some guiding principles that are necessary for criticism? The answer, I think, lies
in the difference between what we might call social or moral or ethical issues, and aesthetic ones,
from a recognition of the difference between issues of social and political responsibility and

issues of aesthetic choice. A critic can and should establish a set of social and political principles
that define his judgment, and act as a foundation for his criticism. The challenge is to hold onto
these principles and at the same time to remain open to a broader range of aesthetic responses to
these principles than any one architect might have, and then to be able to judge these different
aesthetic responses on their own terms. I believe architecture exists in a social and political
context, and almost always needs to be judged within that context.
Finally, Im mindful of another issue John raised, which is the question of the effect architecture
has on the quality of life. For a long time critics yearned for an age when people paid attention to
architecture, when society cared about it. Beware of what you wish for, as they say, for we have
now gotten that wish, and it is a mixed bag. If we once expected too little of architecture, I fear
that today, we may expect too much of it. Architecture does not cure cancer, and it does not put
bread on the table. It is not justice in the courtroom, or peace on the battlefield. If there is
anything the critic needs to be mindful of today, it is that architecture does not solve all of our
problems. It does not sustain life. But it can make the already sustained life much more
meaningful, much more pleasurable, and it is the critics job, in a way, to observe and encourage
and support that process.

Classicism, Modernism and the Idea of


Invention
University of Notre Dame
February 1st, 2010
Good evening. It is a great pleasure to be here, back in this extraordinary institution that I feel
closely connected with thanks to its association with the Driehaus Prize, which as all of you
know has become increasingly important in the world of architecture with each passing year.
And thanks to your great Dean and the wonderful work he does in association with it, the
Driehaus Prize has now become almost as closely identified with the University of Notre Dame
as with Richard Driehaus. I must say that among the many things that is impressive about Notre
Dame, being able to get so much reflected glory from the Driehaus Prize without putting up the
money for it is one of the better achievements.
Seriously, the prize, as you all surely know, is administered by this institution because Richard
Driehaus, the prizes donor, saw in Notre Dame the values he wanted to see more of all across
the world of architecturea willingness to look at the past not as distant and disconnected, but
as a direct inspiration for work that we can do today, and a belief that a firm grounding in the
architecture of the past is an essential part of an education, no matter what direction you
ultimately choose to go in. Richard Driehaus wanted to see traditional architecture as a living
thing, and if he rejected anything, it was not so much modernism as modernisms rejection of the
past. He argued against the false notion that modernism existed at a total remove from traditional

architecture, against the notion that traditional architecture was irrelevant, and against the fallacy
of believing that architecture was entirely re-invented in the twentieth century, and in favor of
seeing it all as a continuum. These are the values that the Driehaus Prize was created to
encourage, and these are the values that this unusual school was created to teach.
All of you know that, of course. Thats why youre here, presumably. Im not here to recite the
basic facts of this institution, which you know so much better than I do, but to try and say a few
words about how these ideas relate right now to some of the issues I have been thinking about in
my own work. This talk has been entitled Why Architecture Matters, which just happens to be
the title of a new book, as youve just heard, and Ill say a little bit about it, and in particular try
to think for a moment about how it may relate to the issues of traditional architecture that so
many architectural critics, theorists, historians and practitioners struggle with. Why Architecture
Matters is a short book, and not particularly aimed at architects, though I very much hope that
they will like it, and respect it. Maybe its really a book that architects might want to give their
clients so that they can figure out why they do what they door that you might want to give
your parents, or girlfriends or boyfriends, who probably wonder about that, alsosince its
purpose is to try and take all the ideas that people like us, architects and critics and people to
whom architecture is second nature, to take these ideas and explain what the point of them is,
why we bother about them in the first place. Trying to articulate all the stuff you have always
taken for granted is a hard task, which is why this book took a while, even though its short.
Writing it made me think of the old clich about how if I had more time, I would have written
you a shorter letter.
Anyway, the book starts with the statement that 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 mattersbeyond,
of course, the obvious fact of shelteris 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 usthe 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 thesethe vernacular, the standard architectural
languageare not the main 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 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 a generic shed, but each helps shape our
environment, and has an effect on us that we should pay attention to. And so, too, with all kinds

of other pieces of construction that are not cathedrals: the vernacular commercial and residential
architecture of the mall and the highway strip and the suburban town of today.
Such buildings are not masterpieces, and I am not trying to be one of those politically correct
critics who says they are. Yet we ignore such things at our peril. McDonalds 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, before the patina of age settled upon it. Now, Im not trying to say that time will
make us love strip malls, or that it should, merely that the design of most of our built
environment today probably reveals a lot about us, 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 Pevsners 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. While the Georgian row house in London was
more modest than the great country estate, they were still two of a kind; they spoke the same
language. Simple slum houses seemed like stripped-down versions of the great house, bargainbasement 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 this century were far
more ambitious as works of architecture than the mere buildings we see today. Ordinary
buildings, in other words, were better then than they are now. This, by the way, connects to the
real failure of modernism, in my view: not that it could not create great buildings, since it can,
but that it cannot create good ordinary ones.
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.
Now, all of this is common knowledge here at Notre Dame, surely. You have been educated to
think in these terms, and to understand the notion of architectural language 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
tenements, that also suggested a common architectural language, emerging from the belief that
every building, no matter how private, showed a public presencethat it had an obligation to the
street and to anyone who passed before it, whether or not they would ever walk through its

doors. This common language reflected a respect for background, for the notion that even the
most common buildings create an urban fabric, and from that comes the beginning of a civilized
environment.
That intention, the way in which even the tenement was clearly intended to enrich the street and
therefore the life of the city, is what makes Pevsners distinction less than useful today. Is the
decorated tenement simply a fancy bicycle shed? Or is it an earthbound echo of Lincoln
Cathedral? Should we think of it as an improved ape or as a damaged angel? The tenement is a
practical construction designed to be more than merely practical, andleaving value judgments
asidethat, a practical thing designed to be more than merely practical, 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 Borrominis church of SantIvo 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. If art is defined to a significant degree by intention, so is architecture.
Why Architecture Matters is by no means a book about classical or traditional architecture, but it
deals a lot with it, sometimes in ways that you may agree with, sometimes not. I thought, since I
am at Notre Dame, that I might talk about those aspects of this book that deal with traditional
and classical architecture, and see what they add up to. While I believe in the importance of a
viable architectural language, as you could see from what I said a moment ago about Georgian
architecture in London, my favorite things have always been those that broke away somewhat,
those works of architecture that used familiar languages but coaxed them into saying new things.
My preferences are always for Hawksmoor, Soane, Lutyens, to stay in England for a moment
for those architects who see classicism not as an opportunity for replicating anything done
before, but as an opportunity for creativity, for reinvention. So I will always take Lutyens over
Sir Herbert Baker, or Hawksmoor over Christopher Wren, great architect though Wren
undoubtedly was; or John Soane over John Nash, for all the gloriousness of the lessons in urban
design that Nash taught us. (That one, I admit, is a harder call, because Nash may have more to
tell us in the twenty-first century than Soane does, given how we are a time so urgently needful
of good urban models of the sort that Nash provide in his great London terraces. But Soanes
breakfast room in his house in Lincolns Inn Fields is one of the greatest rooms in all of Western
architecture, and Nash never designed anything so powerful, or so intimate. )
My argument about great architecture always being new is an important one, I think, because this
idea is so often misunderstood. New does not have to mean radical re-invention, and it most
definitely does not have to mean that a building should not look like anything you have seen
before. Let me explain by using an example you all know, and which I discuss in the book, the
Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., a much more inventive, even radical, building than
people give it credit for. It was loosely based on the Parthenon, as everybody knows, and of
course it is constructed out of the same architectural language. But it is very different from the
Parthenon. That marble box wrapped in thirty-six columns that sits at the end of the Mall in

Washington, may be a Greek temple in one sense, but in another sense 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 timebetween 1915 and
1922as 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 almost to float on the water like the Taj Mahal. 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. Im sorry I chose not to bring slides tonight, but Im sure you all know this and have an
image in your heads.
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 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
Bacons real interest was to communicate the power of abstract form and the strength of silence.
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 Frenchs 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.
But there is more to say about the Lincoln Memorial that goes beyond Rasmussens 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, 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-assurancea building that, as I said, is more
modern, and more inventive, than it is usually given credit for being. If you think classicism and
inventiveness are mutually exclusive, you could not be more wrong, as this building proves so
gloriouslythough I assume that if you are Notre Dame students you would never make that
mistake, that you see classicism as a living language that encourages creativity, and not as a
fundamentalist gospel that is rigid and unchangeable and cannot evolve.

Still, the Lincoln Memorial has never been able to shake free, so to speak, of the old moralistic
argument about the style-for-the-time, the argument 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, the modernists said, was to do what the nineteenth century did, which
was to make architecture that resembled some style of the pastGothic, classical, Romanesque,
Italian Renaissance, Georgian, and so forth, something that, no matter how well you did it, was
bound to be false, they insisted. To build in the right way was to be inspired by the age of the
machine and to turn away from the various 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 Wrights American locution, it was American democracy needing a new architecture.)
Now, today those arguments sound awfully tired. And as I think you know, 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 worksonly the most extreme classical
fundamentalists would deny thatbut 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 II
there is no greater representation of that time than, say, Carrere and Hastingss New York Public
Library, or Warren and Wetmores Grand Central Terminal, or James Gamble Rogerss
Memorial Quadrangle on the Yale campus, or Charles McKims Pennsylvania Station, or Cass
Gilberts Woolworth Building. These are all traditional buildingssome 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 see them as being
totally representative of their time. James Gamble Rogerss Gothic-style buildings at Yale were
no more truly of the Middle Ages than Charles McKims 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. So they were the architecture of their
time. They just werent the avant-garde architecture of their time.
Today I think weve come to 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 didnt
represent their time, they would not have the iconic status that they do for us today.
The moralistic argumentthat the only way to be true to ones time is to create something
completely new and different from what has come beforeis 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 modernism 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 rear-guard, which indeed it was. Yet Popes

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 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.
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 only look 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. Like the
Lincoln Memorial, it is highly inventive; it uses the classical language faithfully, but also
creatively. The National Gallery follows no precise model, less even than the Lincoln Memorial.
The Gallery was not only creative, it was so strong in its architectural fundamentalsin 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 themthat 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. Peis 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 Popes 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 Popes 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 functionalthe 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
ones time, and to build in a style that resembles the architecture of the past is the thing thats
falsea betrayal of ones time, you could almost say. But it has never been that simple. Styles,
as weve said, are languages, and languages always continue to change and evolve. English
today is different from the language of Shakespeares time or even George Bernard Shaws. The
greatest architects who have worked in past styles, architects from Thomas Jefferson to Sir

Edwin Lutyens to Lon 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.
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 then 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 Im 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 Corbusian villa to another may not mean all that much to us, in
the end. Today, both look back, just to different times. 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 Aldrichs
Knickerbocker Club on Fifth Avenue in New York, which is one of the most beautiful Georgianstyle 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 materialslarge 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 Gilberts Woolworth Building, finished in 1913, were so
striking that a prominent rector dubbed the tower The Cathedral of Commerce. But underneath
all of Gilberts terra cotta Gothic ornament was a fully modern skyscraper. The same can be said
of McKim, Mead and Whites 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, no
butlers pantry or maids room but a super-high-tech media room, the interior almost always
reveals the time, whatever the outside is like.
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 picturesque quality to them, as if their
architects were interested in visual ease above all. They lack the toughness of the truly new.
They are stage setswonderful 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 avantgarde. 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 Americas
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.
So for all that the old notion of the style for the time is a fallacy, time can still mean a lot, and
often as much of more than place, in determining what kind of architecture gets built in almost
any place 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 the 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 cornicesbuildings 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. And I was recently in Dubai, a
city that, to its great detriment, bears the mark of its time, the twenty-first century, far more than
the mark of its place, the Middle East.
Technology, of course, 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. Marks 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, amoeba-like shapes that clearly reflect the computerized origin of their designs. Now,
that takes us a long way from buildings that look like Greek temples, obviously. But my point is
to say that almost all architecture, whether or not it reflects technology in its form, takes
advantage of it in its innards, further underscoring its connection to a time. Whatever else you
can say about technology, it is often much more revealing of a buildings time than aesthetics is.
So we do build for a time, and of a time; we just dont build in a style for the time. We cannot
hide a buildings time, nor should we try. If the modernists were wrong in thinking of time as
meaning only style, classicists are sometimes wrong in suggesting that time doesnt mean much
at all. Time means a huge amount. It affects the engineering and the technology of what we
build, as Ive said, but it also affects the cultural context. A classical building put up now isnt
the same as a classical building put up in the nineteen twenties. It may be using the same
language, and it may even be trying to say a similar thing in that language, but it still feels a little
different, just the way a romantic love poem written today, however earnest and well-meaning it
may be, and however well done, is inevitably going to come off as different from a romantic love
poem written in 1910.
One of the key points of Why Architecture Matters, I should say, is the argument it makes
against style. I suppose if there is any key point to this book, other than it being a testament to
the notion that architecture is experiential more than theoretical, it is to say that almost every
way in which we might look at a building means more than the style we classify it as. To the
extent that we perceive buildings as objects, the proportion and scale and materials in that object
mean more than the style. So does light, and how it relates to the building. So does its
relationship to its physical context. So does its way of fulfilling what practical function it may
have. And so do things that are far less easy to measure and classify, like how it relates to our
memories, what thoughts each of us brings to it that connect to the experiences we have had.
By now youve figured out, I think, that I am much more interested in what feelings a building
evokes in us as we look at it or walk through it or live with it over time than I am about where
that building fits into the history and theory of architecture. This book is arranged not
chronologically, and not in terms of types of architecture, but in terms of ways in which
architecture affects us, or ways in which we think about it. The chapter titles make the point:
Meaning, Culture and Symbol; Challenge and Comfort, which is about the constant tension
in architecture between challenging us as art should, and taking care of us, playing a kind of
nurturing role that art does not have to do; Architecture as Object, which starts with the
premise that we have to admit that whatever else a building is, it is also a thing, a physical object
in the physical world, and how it looks still means a lot; and then Architecture as Space, since
it is in the crafting of interior space, the shaping of rooms, that the greatest achievements of
many architects lie; and Architecture and Memory, which is one of my favorite parts of this

book, in part because it is the most personalit talks about how each of us has our own
formative memories of architecture, whether from childhood or adolescence or young
adulthoodbut how we also have a shared cultural memory of architecture, established through
films and literature and art, and how the personal and the shared memories continually play off
against each other. My first memories of architecture were of growing up in New Jersey, and I
know that the town in which I grew up played a critical role in establishing my own sense of
things. My familys house did, but so did the entire town. So did the Yale campus and New
Haven, and so, needless to say, did New York.
After that comes a chapter called Buildings and Time, which is not the same as Architecture
and Memory; it is about how buildings themselves change over time, and so do our attitudes
about them. In this section I talk a fair amount about historic preservation, and about how so
many buildings arent understood in their own times, and even less in the times immediately
after. It often takes a generation or more for a building to find its proper place, and even then,
future generations will see things differently.
The book ends with a chapter called Buildings and the Making of Place, and that is maybe the
most important, because it talks about foreground buildings and background buildings, and about
how you cant really look at a building outside of its context, how context sometimes defines
architecture. And if I have learned anything in my years of looking at buildings, it is that in a
town or city, or even a village, the street matters more than the building. You can have a
wonderful, civilized place with a lot of decent but not great buildings, working together. But you
cant make a civilized town if the buildings do not work together, however great some of them
may be. Buildings in a town or a village are a wonderful metaphor for the meaning of
community, because they all depend on each other, and together they can create a whole that
none of them can make on its own.
So that, in summary, is Why Architecture Matters. Architecture is about the making of place, and
the making of memory. Architecture gives us joy if we are lucky, and it gives us satisfaction and
comfort, but it also connects us to our neighbors, since the architecture of a town or a city is the
physical expression of common ground. In an age when so many of our contacts are virtual,
when we often live in the virtual world of computers, architecture is a constant reminder of the
urgency, of the meaning, and of the value of the real. Buildings are not just inanimate objects;
they are occasions for human contact, and shapers of human contact, which makes them a living
part of our world.
One of the chapters in this book is called Architecture and Memory, which is a rumination on
all of this, and on the way in which personal experience and memory, along with broader cultural
memories of architecture from film and literature and art, all shape how we perceive buildings.

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