Make Your Own Mind Up on Modern Architecture

A perfect definition for nonsense in art: A friend of mine had a (post)modernist composer come to perform for his class and take questions. The artist mic'd a piano, distorted this sound with a computer, and then further distorted the sound by pounding the keys willy nilly, plucking the strings, and behaving avant-gardely. He had a goatee. When the Q&A session came, perhaps not soon enough, my friend remembers a particularly clever question up at the front: "If this is good music, according to your tastes, what then is bad?"

Earlier in the month I wrote a small piece hopefully queering the pitch of nonsense modern architecture. I've not changed my mind, but I do need to remind myself that this blog should be used for positive ideas and not just criticism. To make amends, I've created a list of some spectacular and interesting buildings built in the last hundred years. I've attached the smallest amount of information to the pictures and there's no order. Please make your own minds up. Sample Q's for the Q&A session: What would it be like to live here? Would this be beautiful if it weren't in the country? If this is good, what then is bad?

Toyo Ito's Tod's Building. Perhaps a new kind of eco-architecture. It could also probably stand without the Tod's logo. Is that a logo?

This is Brazil, Salvador I believe.
Gaudi here in Barcelona. One of many great Gaudi buildings, who was one of many great Catalan architects (Puig y Cadafalch being another).
Brazil. More tropical architecture and a great example of buildings using wood in novel ways.

Bart Prince's Gradow residence in Aspen.
The River House in New York. The FDR has since cut off the private docks (boat to elevator to apartment in minutes), but the building still stands majestic. Bottomly, Wagner, and White were the architects, outgranding Candela.

Arcosanti: an experimental town built around ecology, community, and a blatant disregard for getting the thing built.
India. The civic building is a unique opportunity.
Plans by Paolo Soleri, Arcosanti's planner/inventor/architect.
Gaudi.
Japan. I'm not 100% certain but I think this is Shigeru Ban.
Japan.
The International Library of Children's books by Tadao Ando. What a wonderful thing to build.
Tbilisi, Georgia. Soviet Constructivist center for marriage events, a 'Palace of the Marriage'. If you destroy the religious institution you have to repurpose its ceremonies and buildings. Does this look religious?
Shigeru Ban's Pompidou Metz. I love the use of wood.
Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. There are vents in the house that allow the habitants to cool their home with the wind over the stream.

Shigeru Ban's Pompidou Metz.
Zaha Hadid designed this platform for ski jumping.
Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein tower. Walk through it here. What would it be like to live here? Would it change your life?

Some Modern Buildings

2 Things on my 2nd last post.  

1. There are some major exceptions to the rule described.  The Einstein tower (more Expressionist than Modernist), the Bank of China Building and Hong Kong Bank (high-tech hits from architects who have otherwise made some questionable buildings), Le Corbusier had a great sense of proportion, more.
2. I meant that Modern architecture is neither modern (2008) nor modern (every building built in the last 10 years).  Modern is a lingering aesthetic, early 20th century ideology made in steel and glass and now remembered as attractive despite having nothing particularly attractive about it beyond tall interiors.  There are some lowercase modern buildings that do take the environment into their aesthetic and are stunning.  Consider this case: Diller Scofidio + Renfro's Phantom House. 

Some pictures.  Gehry, Pei, the Whitney (an art museum should know better), a building in Tokyo (not uninteresting), Koolhaas. 

Ah Modern Architecture

We've not really had a particularly good word for modern since, well, Modern.  Post-modern is not really descriptive (even with the modifier) and is probably just used to sell books.  Perhaps this we're stuck with Modernism because, as aesthetics are concerned, we haven't had a great shift away from what just was -- Modernism.  Or perhaps they just took the best word first because they were alive and working first.  

This initially-promising, ultimately-too-short-as-with-most-Slate-articles article article has gotten me remembering the worst of Modern architecture.  My grandfather designed his own home in Cuba (allow me to describe it gently: concrete square on rectangle) and his Bauhaus 'aesthetic' was rooted in the same dialectic philosophy that drove him off his island.  It seems like men and women of that era didn't do anything without a manifesto or theory (getting the groceries must have been a chore).  

Amazingly -- an accident of unlucky history -- almost all of those theories were similar in this respect: rich white men kindly telling worker's that they should want to live in buildings that look an awful lot like the factories they kill themselves in.  As time past, the rich white men forgot why the buildings looked the way they did (why is forgotten first) and wanted them for themselves because they looked different, were in nice parts of town, and were vaguely European and Americans have had inferiority complexes about vague Europeans since before Edith Wharton's day.  

4 thoughts: 

1. Isn't Frank Lloyd Wright impressive by comparison?  His main interest wasn't theory but how people should live their lives in their spaces, his main aesthetic was a decorative integration with nature and the need to limit choice (furniture stuck to the floors; no basements for no clutter). 
   
2. Shouldn't we allow the environment and environmentalism to function as our governing aesthetic?  If we align our houses with the sun, keep them a reasonable size, have our windows let in the most natural light, use renewable materials, etc. doesn't a sense of well-being come from the home that's greater that just looking nice?  
3. Isn't Frank Gehry's stuff really, really ugly? What about Liebskind?  Rem Koolhaas?  Could 1,000 monkeys given 1,000 years come up with something as disgusting as that Venice Beach House?  I know it's Venice Beach, but come on.  What if these ideas trickle down into the mainstream?  What if we forget that these are ugly buildings, have nostalgia cloud our taste, and then go on living in cities filled with these things (like Tati's nightmare, Playtime)? 
4. Do we find these building attractive because they were built?  Isn't this a case of the emperor's new clothes?  While not horrible on a Clement Greenberg scale, doesn't the architecture critic function as a salesman with an interest in conflating shit and shinola?  Is the businessman lucky enough to build a building really so easily deceived by namebrand architects and so confused by aesthetics? Perhaps his isn't an aesthetic decision?  Consider Ratner's Atlantic Yards: after much community opposition (it will be a terrible drain on the area), he hired Gehry to redesign the project as if his minimal changes and maximal name would make all the difference in the public's eye.  All Gehry did was plopp out a skyscraper, call it Lady Brooklyn, and hope that by confusing a beloved statue with a reviled project some goodwill might rub off.  Beware the professional expert.