The CIVITAS Chronicles

A recent museum addition by Daniel Libeskind provides vivid evidence of the disdain that many Modernist architects hold not only for traditional design, but also for the work of their professional predecessors. The building in question is an addition to the Military Museum in Dresden, Germany. Not content with merely affixing an unsympathetic, context-defying appendage to the original Neoclassical building, Libeskind took the additional step of slicing through the façade of the older structure to emphasize his total disregard for historic fabric.

Interestingly, to avoid the charge of mere personal grandiosity and ego projection, Libeskind has chosen to cloak his Dresden work in political terms. Says Libeskind, “The new façade’s openness and transparency contrast with the opacity and rigidity of the existing building. The latter represents the severity of the authoritarian past. while the former reflects the openness of the democratic society in which it has been reimagined.”

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A just-issued new set of design principles for infill construction should be mandatory reading for every historic district commission and design review board across the U.S. The groundbreaking new document is from the Historic Preservation League of Oregon (HPLO) and is intended only for historic districts in the state of Oregon. However, the seven principles are relevant for every historic district in the country because they tackle head-on the plague of highly differentiated new design that threatens to undermine the character and historic context of so many older neighborhoods across the U.S.

Many design review boards today demand that new construction in historic districts be in Modernist or highly differentiated styles. To buttress their insistence on Modernism, boards cite the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards – especially the dictate of Standard #9 that “the new work shall be differentiated from the old.” Even though John Sandor of the National Park Service has pointed out that the Secretary’s Standards were not intended to govern rehabilitation in entire historic districts – nonetheless, many preservation commissions have continued to insist that new infill construction be in highly contrasting styles to provide “differentiation.”

With compelling logic and clarity, the new HPLO report refutes the notion that new infill should look radically different. With its seven clear principles, the HPLO document sweeps away previous misinterpretations of the Secretary’s Standards and focuses on preserving a historic district’s essential character as the primary goal. Principle #1 states emphatically: “The District Is the Resource, Not Its Individual Parts.” Supporting text goes on to declare that historic districts are significant as a collective whole and must be protected in their entirety.

To make sure there are no misunderstandings about how best to protect the character of a district, Principle # 4 (“Infill Will Be Compatible yet Distinct”) tackles the issue of architectural style explicitly: “Within historic districts, compatibility is more important than differentiation.” And if that isn’t clear enough, the guideline further states: “Style is discouraged from being the primary indicator of differentiation. Means of differentiation may include materials, mechanical systems, construction methods, and signage.”

These sensible design principles from HPLO are the latest development in a decades-long uproar from many quarters about the devastating effects that misguided interpretations of the Secretary’s Standards have had on historic neighborhoods. Steve Semes’s pioneering book, The Future of the Past, details the fallacies behind some interpretations of the Secretary’s Standards. A recent roundtable organized by the editors of Traditional Building magazine further examined problems posed by architectural contrast. And a 2011 symposium organized by US/ICOMOS has proposed ways to promote compatibility rather than contrast in historic contexts.

The HPLO guidelines represent a new milestone because now an official preservation organization has taken note of grassroots protests and has published clear historic district design principles that contradict much of daily practice in the U.S. The seven new guidelines emphasize – correctly, in my view – the over-arching importance of architectural compatibility in preserving the special character of historic districts. Three cheers for the Historic Preservation League of Oregon. Let’s hope that SHPO offices and preservation groups in the other 49 states are encouraged to do likewise.

 

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A radical new full-year, full-time program for teaching young architects unique design skills is now underway in New York City, sponsored by the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art (ICAA). This revolutionary school is called The Beaux-Arts Atelier and has already attracted the attention of national media like The Wall Street Journal. The fundamental goal of the curriculum is to develop an architect’s artistic sense and appreciation for beauty of form, while at the same time teaching a systematic design method.

Ironically, the unique instruction system being deployed in the Atelier would have seemed quite conventional to architectural students a hundred years ago. The Atelier is based largely around teaching methods developed originally at the world-famous L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris – where many giants of American architecture were educated. By the early 20^th century, most American architecture schools were using many of the Beaux-Arts teaching methods – as set forth in John F. Harbeson’s pioneering book, The Study of Architecture. However, the Beaux-Arts system was ejected from architectural courses after World War II when Modernist faculties took control of the academies – and Harbeson’s book ended up in trash bins. (Happily, Harbeson’s book has been reprinted.)

Beaux-Arts teaching is built around manual skills – especially drawing and sketching – so that the hand can educate the brain. In the age of AutoCAD, many young architects don’t learn how to draw; as a result, an ability to relate to the natural world is lost. There are no straight lines in nature, and the capacity to capture subtle curves and the interplay of light and shadow learned through hand drawing enhances the ability to design beautiful structures. That’s why you’ll find no computers in the Beaux-Arts Atelier – and why the curriculum includes such classes as figure drawing, hand-drafting, modeling and sculpting, the classical orders, proportion and geometry and architectural rendering.

All the newly heightened aesthetic skills come together in the Design Studio, where students are taught a systematic design method that lies at the core of the curriculum. To start off this year’s Design Studio, students were sent off to New York’s Bryant Park to take careful measurements of a small pavilion by Carrere & Hastings that is part of the 1911 New York Public Library complex. After making drawings based on their measurements, the students are challenged to analyze the components of the design and then to use those concepts as the basis for a large urban gateway. The idea is to guide students slowly through successive design problems – and to systematically teach something new at each step in the process.

To keep the intimate atelier atmosphere, the program is limited to 12 students per year. Having 10 instructors for the students makes the Beaux-Arts Atelier quite a varied and rich educational experience. To cap off their academic year, students spend two weeks in Rome drawing and painting – and studying how Rome has successfully integrated new buildings into its historic context over the centuries.

The Beaux-Arts Atelier holds the promise of teaching a new generation how to appreciate and – more important – how to design beautiful structures that will contribute to a more humane built environment. Let’s hope its influence spreads.

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The deadline for entering the 2012 Palladio Awards competition is fast approaching. Having been a Palladio juror on a number of occasions, I’ve noted that all winning entries have several elements in common. So I’m passing some of these observations along, tips, really, that can enhance your chances of winning one of these coveted awards.

The benefits that flow from winning a Palladio are obvious. First are the bragging rights; the Palladio Awards are still the only national architectural competition that honors projects for excellence in traditional design. So winning one is a big deal, with a lot of prestige and publicity spinoff potential. The handsome bronze Palladio trophy on your office awards shelf proclaims your achievement for years to come. And even if you don’t win one of the top awards, there’s a good chance your project will be published in Traditional Building or Period Homes magazine sometime during the next 12 months. Because Palladio Award submissions represent the best of today’s traditional design, when the editors of Traditional Building and Period Homes are looking for projects to feature throughout the year, they often turn first to Palladio entries that were excellent – but didn’t happen to walk off with a top prize.

Here are seven things you can do to improve your chances of winning.

1. Good photos are essential. Jurors are only human, and when there are a lot of projects to evaluate, their attention is more like to be captured by submissions with clear, striking photographs.

2. Big, full-page images are best, rather than multiple images crammed on a single page.

3. On renovation and restoration projects, obviously before-and-after photos are important. Sometimes the before pictures are lousy – and that’s O.K. because often you are not in control of the before photos. Just make sure the after photos are outstanding.

4. Photo captions should not be just terse labels. Rather, captions should be informative and direct readers to special features they should be looking for in the photo. Pointing things out with captions is important because jurors do spend a lot of time with the images.

5. Site plans and floor plans are always very helpful.

6. When projects involve additions, renovations or both, the photos, plans and captions should make it very clear what is old original work and what is your new work.

7. Text covering unusual features and design challenges should be crisp and concise; jurors don’t have time to swoon over poetical language. Emphasize the specific things you did on the project that you’re most proud of.

These tips may seem self evident. But I’ve personally seen too many submissions that ignored several of these points, and otherwise good projects got less attention than they should have received.

So keep these seven pointers in mind when you download the Palladio application forms. It’ll greatly enhance your chances of being on the receiving end when the editors hand out the Palladio trophies at the 2012 awards dinner.

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The announcement that Michael Kimmelman is taking over as architecture critic for the New York Times carries with it the hope that the Times’ global audience will soon be exposed to a broader, more humane view of what constitutes excellence in architecture.

For better or worse, the New York Times’ architecture critic is probably the most influential voice shaping mainstream architectural taste. Often, what people see in the Times is all they ever read about architecture. And in the 19-year reign of Herbert Muschamp and Nicolai Ourossoff that began in 1992, the architecture pages of the Times have been a never-ending stream of praise for a handful of “starchitects” who kept the two critics amused with ever-more-outlandish creations. Novelty was the paradigm that Muschamp and Ourossoff valued above all else. They paid little attention to the way a building functioned, if it was liked by people who used it or whether it made any contribution to its surroundings.

I was not the only one who found Nicolai Ourossoff’s fawning over fashionable architects infuriating. Alexandra Lange, a respected architecture critic in her own right (and not a card-carrying traditionalist), recently posted a lengthy and very thoughtful take-down of the Times’ now-departed architecture critic.

Not everyone shares my enthusiasm about the coming Age of Kimmelman. There has been much weeping and wailing and rending of garments in some of the architecture press over the fact that Kimmelman, formerly the Times’ senior arts critic, is neither an architect nor trained in design. And others fret that he’s going to be allowed, with his title of “Senior Critic,” to write on cultural topics besides architecture. Such carping is totally off the mark: It’ll be a breath of fresh air to have an architecture critic with a broad humanist background who’s not playing an inside game.

Having followed Michael Kimmelman’s writings in the arts field, I have been impressed with his wide-ranging cultural framework and rationality. He seems to love places that provide emotional satisfaction, as well as academic and intellectual stimulation. Even though I’m no fan of Peter Zumthor, I found Kimmelman’s profile of him quite engaging and insightful. His analysis of David Chipperfield’s reconstruction of the war-ravaged Neues Museum in Berlin was a poetical evocation of the building’s fusion of past and present. And Kimmelman became my BFF with a piece he recently published decrying the museum world’s dismaying lack of interest in figurative sculpture. (Anyone who loves figurative sculpture is a friend of mine!)

So I have hope. The architecture critic of the New York Times is under enormous pressure from many different constituencies. And I suspect I’ll disagree with Michael Kimmelman on more occasions than I agree with him. But his past writings encourage me to believe he understands that architecture is a public art with civic obligations. In the past he’s stated he cares about “how we live . . . how buildings actually work . . . city planning, public policy, neighborhoods, communities and characters . . . architecture as a complex and contradictory discipline . . . .” In a portfolio that large, there should be room for traditional architecture!

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It’s gratifying to see that at least one of the housing reconstruction programs in New Orleans believes in context-sensitive design. Too many well-intentioned housing programs fall short when measured against the yardstick of humane urbanism. But Project Home Again, sponsored by the Leonard and Louise Riggio Foundation, is providing much-needed housing, while also helping to re-establish the special character that has always defined New Orleans neighborhoods.

Project Home Again has already built nearly 100 new homes, mainly in the Gentilly District. In addition to featuring high-quality, energy-efficient construction, the homes display a traditional New Orleans vernacular look. As a result, the new construction is contributing to New Orleans’s unique sense of place, knitting together neighborhood fabric that was badly torn apart by Katrina’s disastrous floods.

Spearheaded by Leonard Riggio, the founder and chairman of the Barnes & Noble book retailing empire, Project Home Again’s underlying mission is to develop a scalable affordable housing program that features energy-efficient construction and that fosters neighborhood recovery, while also supporting returning homeowners. The basic idea underlying Project Home Again’s low-cost, high-efficiency approach is to use passive energy-conserving features that complement natural ventilation whenever possible. Design details include strategically placed shading, ceiling fans in every room and double-hung, double-glazed, low-e windows – supplemented by high-performance mechanical systems, including dehumidification.

Further economies are achieved by limiting construction to a small number of basic home models – four so far – with sizes ranging from about 1,000 sq. ft. to 1,500 sq. ft. The designs, all based on traditional New Orleans housing types, were created for the project by John L. Schackai, AIA, a local architect with deep understanding of the city’s building culture. In addition to cross-ventilation and passive heat-reduction features, whenever possible, Schackai also incorporates good-sized, screened-in porches that can be used for sleeping.

What raises Project Home Again above humanitarian relief and places it in the realm of humane urbanism is the approach to exterior design. The exteriors are purposefully modest and intentionally avoid the “bold architectural statements” that characterize many of the houses of Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Foundation.

Schackai’s designs blend seamlessly into the mix of surviving houses in the small communities that form the larger Gentilly neighborhood. As a result, the focus is not on “look at me!” architecture, but rather on healing the neighborhood by filling in devastated blocks in ways that emphasize the continuity of New Orleans’s tradition.

Through a holistic architectural design process, Project Home Again is doing more than putting a roof over people’s heads: It is also restoring communities and reviving a reassuring sense of place.

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Preservationists who believe the duty of landmark commissions is to preserve the special character of historic districts have been dealt another blow. An amazing 9-0 decision by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission has shown once again that the commission – like many similar review boards across the U.S. – functions like an architectural awards jury when it comes to additions and infill construction. Similar to their peers everywhere, commission members seem unwilling or unable to evaluate projects on the impact they’ll have on the historic character of the entire district.

The project currently at issue is the addition of two stories onto an existing three-story building in New York’s Tribeca West Historic District. Rather than consider the project in light of its effect on the entire district, the members seemed to focus primarily on design issues of the proposed new façade. And in so doing, they have implicitly applied a simplistic interpretation of the Secretary of the Interior’s Standard #9: “New work will be differentiated from the old.”

The design for the proposed addition was vigorously opposed by New York City’s Historic Districts Council on the grounds that the façade was unsympathetic to the existing character of the neighborhood. But commission members brushed aside these objections, using words like “smart,” “delirious,” “exciting,” “robust and inventive” to laud the proposed new façade. The commission’s chairman, Robert Tierney, went so far as to enthuse: “It actually enhances the richness of the district.” It’s a remark that makes sense only if the commission’s purpose is to promote radical contrast, rather than aesthetic wholeness, in the district.

The contradiction between the Landmarks Commission’s fixation on the character of individual buildings as opposed to entire districts is best illustrated by the commission’s regulations on windows. If a building owner in an historic district wants to replace windows, there is a highly complex permit-and-approval process that gets down to the level of regulating muntin profiles.

Having gone to this degree of detail to protect the character of existing buildings, it seems ludicrous (to this writer at least) that the commission imposes no such tests on the effect that additions and infill construction will have on the character of the entire district. Instead, approvals on additions and new construction seem to rest on the architectural tastes of commission members. And for most new projects, current commission members seem to favor Modernist styles, regardless of context.

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The Pritzker Architecture Prize is titled incorrectly. It should be called “the Pritzker Prize for Modernist Architecture.” That’s what it is, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But its current name implies that it recognizes achievement in the entire field of architecture, and that posture is misleading – if not downright deceptive.

The recent announcement of Eduardo Souto de Moura of Porto, Portugal, as winner of the 2011 Pritzker Architecture Prize confirms once again that the Pritzker Prize is restricted to a certain type of architecture. Pritzker juries have invariably only honored architects who adhere to Modernist ideology and who believe that architecture has nothing to learn from the past. This latest Pritzker award also casts into sharp relief why the Driehaus Prize is so important and necessary.

According to its prospectus, the purpose of the Pritzker Prize is: “To honor a living architect whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, [one] which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.” It’s a very general specification – leaving almost total latitude to the jury. Nothing in the purpose speaks to architectural style or philosophy. Therefore, the critical determinant of who the winner will be is: who’s on the jury. And if the jury panel is stacked with persons imbued with Modernist ideology, the type – if not the name – of the winner is preordained.

A roster of some recent Pritzker laureates makes the case: Peter Zumthor, Jean Nouvel, Richard Rogers, Thom Mayne, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & Meuron, Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, et al., et al. Some are international “starchitects”; others are not as well known. But they all share the same emphasis on novelty and the belief that buildings should be stand-alone sculptures. The concept of buildings as harmonious components of an urban ensemble is totally alien to them. And the Pritzker’s system of overlapping terms of jurors – along with the predilections of the prize’s administrators – assures continuance of the Modernist culture in the Pritzker jury pool.

The advent of the Driehaus Prize was a welcome counterweight to the Pritzker. First of all, the Driehaus has an honest name: “The Richard H. Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture.” Unlike the Pritzker, the Driehaus specifically recognizes fundamentally different philosophies within the architectural universe. Driehaus laureates are drawn only from the ranks of architects who work in the classical and historical tradition – architects who are de facto excluded from the Pritzker. The Driehaus Prize does not pretend (like the Pritzker) to cover the entire world of architecture.

 

So I extend hearty congratulations to Robert A.M. Stern, the  2011 winner of the Richard H. Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture. And, in the spirit of bi-partisan comity, I also congratulate Eduardo Souto de Moura, winner of the 2011 Pritzker Prize for Modernist Architecture.

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I am a harsh critic of irrational contemporary architecture. That’s why I was amazed when I found myself rather liking the new Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, FL. At first glance, it appears it might be just another self-indulgent piece of polymorphic “starchitecture”. But the closer I looked, the more I realized the building, designed by HOK’s Florida office, is not as strange as it first appears: Despite its raffish façade, it is a rational structure.

For starters, the building opened on time and was $700,000 under budget – quite unusual for a large, complicated (68,000-sq.-ft., $30-million) project. And the museum’s lead architect, HOK’s Yann Weymouth, used existing technology – rather than calling for invention of untried building details. Admittedly, the museum’s bulging glass atrium, called “The Enigma,” challenged the capabilities of engineers at Novum Structures. But the glass bump that provides the museum’s distinctive look was built using glass enclosure technology that Novum has proven elsewhere. To test my belief that this museum is a rational structure, I measured it against the Vitruvian triad of “Firmitas, Utilitas, Venustas” – and the building comes out quite well.

FIRMITAS: As for durability, the building’s primary design imperative was an ability to resist 165-mph hurricane winds. To this end, Weymouth designed a simple three-story box made of 18-in.-thick reinforced concrete. Assuming there will be occasional flooding, all of the museum’s art and HVAC systems are placed on the second and third floors – well above all historic flood levels.

One obvious question: Is the glass Enigma water tight? All panes of the glass atrium are flat and triangular, held in a matrix of metal tubes. – similar to a geodesic dome. It’s been in place over six months – and so far no leaks. Unlike the 18-in. reinforced concrete, the laminated glass is only certified for a Category 3 hurricane (130-mph winds), but all the art is separated from the exterior glass atrium and other openings in the outer concrete walls by an interior concrete wall and metal roll-down shutters.

UTILITAS: The building certainly is functionally suitable for displaying the largest collection of Salvador Dali paintings in the New World. Because the Enigma (named after a Dali painting) starts as a skylight at the top of the building, the galleries are well lit. And anyone familiar with Dali’s surrealist paintings will recognize the appropriateness of the organic way the Enigma appears to have started like a giant water drop that rolled off the top of the buildings and became frozen as it hit the ground.

VENUSTAS: To relieve the monotony of the museum’s durable, economical concrete box, architect Weymouth split the monolithic concrete with the amorphously shaped glass skylight/atrium. If you like Dali’s melting watches in his painting “The Persistence of Memory,” you’ll see the appropriateness and beauty of the Enigma. Weymouth’s architectural inspiration is fabulously eccentric, giving the building humor and character reminiscent of Dali himself.

Architect Yann Weymouth has come up with a non-traditional museum building that is both rational and functional – and which will please the vast majority of its visitors. Congratulations!

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An astonishing recent statement by a leading contemporary architect reveals much about the mindset of today’s new Modernists. Those 43 words explain why so many urban environments are becoming a playground for aggressively bizarre buildings, all clamoring for attention like bickering five-year-olds.

The revealing statement was blurted out during a panel assembled by New York magazine for the purpose of picking “The Greatest Building in New York.” Architect Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, told his fellow panelists that he believed a great building should be a good citizen and “. . . to work with the city and not against it.” Gregg Pasquarelli of SHoP Architects immediately shot back: “I disagree. Like other kinds of art, great buildings contradict everything else. They make us think. They start conversations, so people talk about what it means to fit in, what it means to have courage. It’s okay for some buildings not to work.”

In that one amazing statement, Pasquarelli makes clear that crazy, irrational buildings stem from this widely held conviction that an architect is an artist whose canvas happens to be the entire cityscape. Of course, the claim that an architect is just like a painter or sculptor is debatable, to say the least. A bad painting or sculpture can be easily avoided or ignored. However, a bad building that is not a “good citizen” to its neighbors cannot be ignored by passersby. Architects have a responsibility to the public realm much greater than the painter or sculptor. To call for buildings that “contradict everything else” is just a fancy way of masking architects’ arbitrary search for gimmicks and novelty.

The further assertion that it’s O.K. for a building “not to work” as long as it “makes us think” is arrogant in the extreme. It suggests that the artist/architect is an aesthetic law unto himself or herself – and the rest of us be damned. Never mind if the people who use the building don’t like it; never mind if the building leaks and requires excessive repairs and maintenance; never mind if the building doesn’t well serve its intended function; never mind if the building disrupts the character of the entire neighborhood.

Ironically, after all the rhetoric in favor of contradictory iconic buildings, Pasquarelli went along with the majority of his fellow panelists (most of whom were Modernists) in voting for Grand Central Terminal as the greatest building in New York. And please note: Grand Central – a classical Beaux-Arts building – is definitely (to use Stern’s terminology) a good citizen!

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