It seems to me that there's a disconnect between architecture that architects prefer and architecture that non-architects prefer, GENERALLY. For instance, large corporations tend to hire big-name architects to design new headquarters done up in the avant-garde mode of design, then the big wigs at that corporation notoriously go home to Colonial Revival homes. Has anyone heard a good reason for this?
Is there a good reason why architects expect avant-garde designs to resonate with the rest of the public?
Is there a reason that the architectural industry, as a whole, has turned its back on traditional design, which is widely recognized, accepted, and more culturally rooted in our society that avant-garde alternatives?
I don't mean to be on a soap box here (or maybe I do), but I haven't gotten more than "We're smart, they're stupid" and "It's reactionary" from even my smartest colleagues and ex-professors.
Don't architects have a responsibility to the public to create a recognizable, understandable (familiar), and beautiful built public envirinment through which to navigate and safely live their lives?
FYI, I have no qualms with avant-garde architecture for personal use when it's removed from public context.
I hope to learn a thing or two from this large group of practitioners, teachers, and afficianados.
You'll find (if you look) that Joe Public doesn't "get" avant- gardism. Peolpe know what a church is supposed to look like to read as a church; the same goes for courthouses and libraries, houses, office buildings- the typology list is quite long.
If there's no responsibilty to the Public, especially with regard to public buildings, who's willing to leave a legacy of screwing up the civic domain because someone paid you to? Think- if I gave you a million dollars, would you screw up your favorite place with a design I dominated (as a client)?
No one has spoken to the cultural traditions of a place and how they are abandoned by non-traditional architecture. See? No one really seems to give a sh*t!
My first architectural job was with TAC in Cambridge MA, then (1960) considered very avant-guard. When I complained about the design of a developer's project, one partner told me "All architecture is 90% crap, here we are lucky and only have to produce 50% crap." Another standard to remember is that 50% of all Architects (as well as all other professionals) are below average, unfortunately the below average ones don't know it. EDS
I really appreciate everyone's candor and patience with my ranting. I look forward to the rest of my career being fulfilling for me and rewarding for my clients. I've been blessed with my mentors and employers, and the future looks bright through my eyes- especially considering the current American Renaissance getting started as I enter the meaty part of my career.
Please accept my apology if I've stepped on your toes with my posts. I'm sure you all are perfectly thrilled with the work you've done, and we've all made the world what it is today- which, in the end, is pretty great!
I realize that this 180d change in my perspective must come as a shock, given my earlier posts. I re-read them and realized how negative they were and how my frustration must have been contagious. I'm sure everything will work out fine in the end. I'll do what I can to make the world a better place, as I'm sure you all will do as much as you feel you need to.
Thanks for the conversation so far, and I hope to truly learn something from this group of clearly experienced architects, designers, and afficianados.
Have you got a 'professional degree? The reason I ask is that the question you 've asked has been covered from various points of view in a number of books. If you had the professional degree, you'd have bumped into these by now, depending I guess on where you went to school.
No, not yet. I have a BA in Architecture. I chose to forego the fifth year at my undergrad alma mater, which I suspect will work in my favor in the long run (allow me to get my BArch or MArch from a more prestigious school). I worked as a framer and landscape installer during college summers, which were really good experiences.
I'm an architect and don't like 90% of what I see in the trade rags. I also like modern architecture.
I worked with a guy who really dug A.M. Stern. Go figure.
They want a building that "says" something. Most of the time it says "crap", but, like the fashion runways, it's the fashionable thing to do at the time. Unlike the fashion runways, clothes can be closeted. As Frank Lloyd Wright said "A doctor can always bury his mistakes. An architect can only advise his clients to go and plant vines."
Plus what Pat said... it's hard to scale "traditional" at today's building prices. Correctly done "traditional" will cost way more than "correctly" done modernism, even if its big budget crap.
I don't. In fact, I'm not sure what you're talking about. It's the client that lets it happen. If the client didn't demand that Libeskind didn't make crap then he would be out of work. How about asking the client if they care if their building "resonates" with the rest of the public. It's their money and their building. If you don't like it, stay way.
You're making some pretty darn broad assumptions. The *whole* architectural industry (whatever that means)? "Widely recognized, accepted?" "Culturally rooted?"
Who's the industry? All architects...except me, so the idea that the whole industry is involved is shot.
And what "traditional" design is widely accepted? Colonial revivial? Tudor? Victorian? Neo-Classical? Classical? Post-modern Classical? Vernacular northern mid-west? Lest you also forget that much of "traditional" was "avant-garde" at some point in history.
And "culturally rooted" in what? I have considerable ties to Finland. They, as a people, are "culturally rooted", yet have embraced a modern style. They have great "traditional" buildings, but also have even better "modern" ones. So don't give me this crap that "traditional" design is "culturally rooted."
Well... my experience says that most architectural professors are stupid...they haven't designed anything that ever got built so they really don't know what they're talking about.
But you must understand that "we" (that is us, the culture) has caused this to happen. In order to get famous you have to get noticed. And, just as in the art world nobody gets famous for being good at it anymore, they only get famous for being outrageous. Elephant Dung is "art" and makes the news. A great landscape is also art, but sold for $5 at the county fair. Architects aren't too different. You want to be noticed, so you design and build a giant ball of tinfoil and call it a building. Gets you noticed. You get famous. Now everyone wants your brand of tinfoil.
Answer why Brittany Spears ever made it big and you'll have the answer to your question.
Sure...I think the law says something about accessible and safe. The rest is up to the client. Besides, there are many who call FOG's tinfoil buildings "recognizable, understandable and beautiful." I don't know that I agree, but he get's 'em built.
Tell you what, you get licensed as an architect and then you go about getting clients and insist to each client that you will only work for them if you can design "recognizable, understandable and beautiful built public environments (spelling corrected) through which to navigate safely and live their lives." If the client can accept those conditions, you're set.
So...you're the final arbiter of taste? Who made you the God of good Architectural taste? Again, it's the client's building. If it's a tax-payer financed building, should we each have a vote on it? What if something you don't like gets voted in? You're whole theory kind of gets blown apart, doesn't it? And don't get me started on the whole tax-payer funded buildings...I'm already annoyed enough because of the inability to reason found in the OP.
You will...assuming you're willing to 1) reason, 2) cast away emotional feelings and 3) not get offended when somebody is straight with you.
"Prestigious" school don't mean crap. NOBODY ever asks where I went to school before I get a job. Maybe later it comes up...and I went to a "prestigious" ranked architecture school. They were a bunch of idiots, too...sure there were a professor or two who I respected, but for the most part... Man, were they happy to see me graduate.
I meant a degree that leads to certification, wherever it is that you are, as opposed to a technology program. There tends to be some 'discourse' on the more philosophical/political aspects of architecture at the first sort of institutions.
Four years in one must have been plenty of time for someone seriously interested in the issue, whether the local pedagogy wanted it or not, to have come across numerous books on the subject that would have been published between 1978 and about 1990. (I don't follow what the chattering classes are saying about architecture since I went into practice. Every once in a while the media publish something and I am reassured that it is 95% BS.)
I was going to school between 81 and 87 and even in my school, where it was vigorously discouraged, there was a contingent of people who advocated for a traditional approach to design at a considerable cost to their grade point averages.
I've always advocated for the freedom to design any way you want to and for clients to be able to choose whatever type of design they want. In the real world of politics and marketing, especially when it come so large public commissions, this is never really accomplished. The 'discourse' is tirelessly managed by elites, and people who spend public money are constantly having dreams where they are naked in front of that public. For the foreseeable future I expect large public commissions to be non-orthogonal, with a fair portion displaying what passes for "wit".
The last big advocate for traditionalism that I noticed was R.M. Stern.
Got that right. All they can do is talk until few understand what they're talking about, and the rest don't care.
I had a guy who used to say a piece of architecture had to have "3 ideas". Not 2, not 4, 3. I once did one of those quickie loosening-up exercises once in his urban design studio, where I made an "unfinished city" on Ellis Island (their site), which was always in flux, never completed. A densely packed grid of skyscrapers, many of them under construction, some under demolition.
At the crit he says, "You have made a ruin.". I said, "No. A ruin was completed, and then partly destroyed. This idea is "unfinished"." He said, "You can't do that." I said, "I just did. It's a metaphor for the ephemerality of architecture in the modern city." He said, "There are no precedents for an 'unfinished city'. It must be a ruin." I said, "No, it's *unfinished*. See the cranes atop many of the buildings?" He said, "You can't do that........" etc.
It was rumored that he suffered a near nervous collapse at the existential challenge of designing a 15 foot storefront.....
This guy later became head of Urban Design in TO, but has now thankfully left town for someplace else that might take everything he says like it's divine fiat.
Hehe In the first year, mid-term "sinking or swimming" evaluation, they told me to go to an "American school" because I might "do well" there. Once I saw the tuitions on the east coast, I came back and hacked a swath through the BS for people who had their own ideas. Lots of staff never worked there again after I was done.
Great discussion, I miss this stuff in here, but I have no reason to complain as I have added very little to the conversation in here lately. As much as the stuff in school was full of itself, I did enjoy it, but then again, I enjoyed philosophy very much. There has to be room for those pushing the boundaries of tradition and good taste as there is for those that would like as little change as possible to take place. Everyone in the middle (which is most of us) can learn from both (and learn as in what to do and not to do).
"GrandTradition" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@z35g2000cwz.googlegroups.com:
Just a guess, but, (1) one's preferred work environment is often different from one's preferred home/living environment; (2) many company executives what their company to be *perceived* as being cutting edge,and/or modern, efficient, sleek, future-oriented, progresive, constantly renewing itself, and so on - but what these same people consider "home" - or, perhaps more accurately, what their *wives* consider "homey" - is typically far more traditional and conservative.
IOW, the company "face" is typically something like a "sheep in wolf's clothing". Sort of like taking plain old mundane Borax, and putting it into a curvy-shaped brushed-stainless-steel container and calling it "technoclean".
As above. The visual language says "progressive/innovative". OTOH, banks, for example, want to project a visual signal that says "tradition" and "stability".
It's generally self-defeating to underestimate the power of symbols as communication. Why do you think different people buy different style s of cars? Practicality is, for most people, a very *very* distant second to the sonconscious idea of "what does this item say about me, what image does it project to others".
In essence, architects are sort of like "clothing designers" for clients
- and, as the saying goes, "clothes make the man". If you dress like a bum, people will treat you like one, even if you have $10million in investments and bank accounts. OTOH, you can be penniless, but, if you can wrangle designer-label duds, people treat you like royalty.
IOW, it's all about perceptions - for the vast majority of people, their actions are based, *not* upon rational analysis, but upon their subconscious perceptions.
I don't knwo that the question is relevant. For one thing, in essence, you're implying (whether intentionally or not) that "whatever is average (a.k.a. mundane, un-inventive, uncreative) is The Absolute Best thing to do in all cases". That sort of idea is one reason that energy efficiency is still so underused - to some people, fiberglass batting seems to be some sort of strange new alien technology.
Personally, I loathe pseudo-neo-"Colonial" stuff - OTOH, as people who move frequently, we were well aware, when we bought the house in our area Massachusetts, that a neo-Colonial was the *only* thing that we'd be able to resell when we moved again, because the average buyer thre is habituated to that style and sees other styles (except for perhaps Victorian) as weird, ugly, freakish, or otherwise undesireable.
And your exaggerated overgeneralization that *ALL* companies use "freakish" architecture is patently wrong.
Just churn out the "same old same-old" as the saying goes? Not at all. And if it were, well, there'd be no point in having architects at all - all you'd need is people who could finagle the engineeringto add or subtract more rooms/subunits.
Was the Empire State Building the building-style that the common people used for their dwellings? The Arch in St. Louis? Were the cathedrals and plazas and so on of Rennaissance Europe? Of course not. They embodied the *aspirations* of people, not the tedious, unchanging routines of the Daily Grind. They were revolutionalry for their times.
Yet your implications is that they therefore ought not to have been built at all.
Architecture is more than just Yet Another Bowl of Gruel that people don't even have to chew, never mind think about. If/when it does become that, it will have died, and something else will have taken its place.
Yes, people need to have a sense of continuity with the past, but they also have to have a sense of the promise of the future.
The Artist (and yes, Architecture is, at least sometimes, *still* one of th eArts) persents people with ideas, views, perceptions of, and about, the world that they otherwise would not have thought about.
I would not want to live in a world where all one ever saw was the past. Too many people are stuck in ht epast, or at least, some idealized version of it that people mistake for being the past.
And here is ahuge problem with what gets passed off as being "traditional" - it seldom *is*. If one is going to blither about "traditional", then do that which is *actually* so. None of this nonsense of slapping Victorian gingerbread onto a pseudo- Mediterranian/Pueblo/Haciena Frankenstein monster. None of this BS with gluing a few boards onto a basic Monopoly game-piece structure and calling it "Tudor". Lose all of that BS. IF you're going to do traditional Tuscan, then DO traditional Tuscan - same for all the rest. No more mixing metaphors, because all that does is *destroy* the things that truely *are* traditional, that truely *are* links to the past.
As with all things, the sword cuts both ways. Pasting froufrou onto a box does not turn it into a work of woodworking artisanship.
So anyone who likes the fact that any "public context" which includes innovation is, what?
Maybe not everyone thinks the way you do. Maybe some like to have both.
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