Not long after completing his iconoclastic Glass House in 1949, architect Philip Johnson traded barbs as revealing as the see-through walls.
“Very nice, but I couldn’t live there,” a pretentious visitor said. “I haven’t asked you to, madame,” Johnson retorted.
Paul Goldberger cites the exchange in his new book, “Why Architecture Matters” ($26), to underline lofty goals of architecture. Great houses are seldom uplifting to those who live in them, he writes. Human comfort is secondary when buildings aspire to high art.
“It is churlish to complain that Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses leak, or that Le Corbusier’s weather badly or that Frank Gehry’s are difficult to construct,” Goldberger says of modernist visionaries. “A leaky roof is not our problem, and neither is the fact that we might not wish to live in such a building ourselves.”
Visual pleasure as a higher good than comfort and practicality? It smacks of architectural arrogance.
Goldberger’s answer is that buildings primarily disappoint “not because of failure to deliver on their aesthetic aspirations, but because their architects had given up on aesthetic aspirations altogether and thought only in terms of efficiency.”
His examples are everywhere: The hospital that is a “cold, forbidding environment” for patients and staff; the school designed “more for the ease of the custodial staff” than the students and teachers; airports with “endless concourses” designed for moving airplanes rather than people; and strip malls planned “solely to make it easier to drive cars in and out.”
“Why Architecture Matters,” in the author’s words, is an attempt to “come to grips with how things feel to us when we stand before them … emotionally as well as intellectually.”
He wants readers “to look, and … to trust your eye,” and he provides the basics by distilling architectural theories into lucid concepts, and analyzing structures that exemplify notable styles.
In Goldberger’s view, no one has summed up architecture better than Vitruvius of ancient Rome, who posited that a successful building “must simultaneously be useful, well built and visually appealing.”
His cogent analyses range from the cavernous Pantheon of ancient Rome to Georgian mansions in England, from New York’s sleek Seagram Building by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to Gehry’s audacious Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and Beijing’s mind-bending CCTV tower by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren.
Goldberger writes in a broadbrush, aphoristic style honed as the New Yorker magazine’s “Sky Line” columnist.
Raised in Nutley, N.J., 10 miles west of Manhattan, Goldberger isn’t just big city in his tastes. His architectural universe embraces aesthetic quality in any style if properly sited, be it clapboard houses of New England, the French Gothic splendor of Chartres Cathedral, the serenity of India’s Taj Mahal or the flowing Lawn of the University of Virginia.
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