In fact, America has beautiful and popular non-traditional structures – the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles – and it has crude and soulless classical buildings. Unfortunately, the authors of the order are not completely wrong when they say that some architects have ignored public feeling. — The Guardian
Rowan Moore, architecture critic at The Observer, responds to last week's presidential executive order that makes classical and traditional architecture the preferred style for federal buildings.
"If architects don’t want to give ammunition to the repressive thinking behind this order," Moore writes, "they have to show that there are better ways to engage the public."
3 Comments
What is the "public" opinion - how does one go about divining what does the public think, not to mention balancing the views of users across the lifetime of the building? What if the vocal representatives of the public wants an imitation facade attached to a modern box? Should designers just acquiesce to that opinion or dig deeper to satisfy the visual demand for classical facades while coming up with ingenuious technical and aesthetic ideas to make the building efficient, generous, beautiful, and imaginative? Examples of the latter are rare. Underneath it all is a fear of doing it wrong - that trying something new would blow up in one's faces for decades to come, and that replicating the looks of tried-and-tested classical facades is the safest option, even if the proportions are off and materials are poor imitations of the "original". Doing new classical architecture well (At least the facades, which seems to be what the proponents mostly care about. Chicago's main public library gets praises for its take on the, er, Gothic, but its insipid main interiors get glossed over) is difficult.
Rowan's right, you can't have it both ways. There shouldn't be state mandated classicism any more than an academically mandated modernism. One doesn't need to renounce their love of modernism to allow other’s their affection for traditional styles if aesthetics are truly subjective. The only intellectually honest position is to allow the pluralism of modern liberal democracies to flourish. Fascists are only too happy to paint you as illiberal only to take your lunch because you deny the obvious. This doesn't mean that anything goes. There will always be some styles more appropriate to some contexts than others, but no one ever slammed a modern musician or artist for being eclectic.
There is plenty of futurism in architecture, some interesting some bad. It's easy to point fingers at architects instead of the larger media culture. Remember when futurism and modernism was ascendant in the 50s? Now the past is the future and the future is the past. I bet the public would be more responsive to the SF Morphosis building if they encountered more design culture in everyday life--it's a smart building, climate friendly and visually interesting. Architects can't do everything--but perhaps that's what we will have to do (again).
And again with the Philip Johnson banning--is anyone banning Le Corbusier and Gropius for thinking Stalin would be some client of modernism (he quickly went full Czar mode). As racial essentialism grows again in America, perhaps it is necessary to cover up and hide away the cautionary tales.
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