dbhstockton said:
Were you criticizing both the early twentieth century revivalists and contemporary architects trying work within that idiom? If this is not the case, then Ablarc's comments are a little unfair.
^ Why?
That naughty architect. Look, he's working in the classical, gothic or whatever style --and this is the 20th Century. Tut, tut.
Wait...! is it the
early 20th Century or the
late 20th Century?
What has really changed since the early 20th Century?
Thing that bothers me is these things are always couched in moralistic terms. Like purse-lipped schoolmarms we declare this is what an architect
should or
shouldn't be doing as though eternal architectural verities were conveyed by a theory of history.
I long ago stopped bothering my head with such fruitless questions. If the architect's product pleases and leaves the environment improved, hey, kick back and enjoy it. No need to cluck judgmentally because you think it's in the wrong style. Eyes are better to see with than theories.
What an architect should do is design good looking buildings that work well. Looks good, works well? It's fine; check theories at the door. Thank you very much.
Let's get on with making nice places whichever way we know how. There are plenty of incompetents who would blow any style they attempted. No reason to encourage them with theories that ascribe originality to what may only be ineptitude.
* * *
Czsz, essay on the way (people always give me homework
) --though possibly without photos.
Didn't mean to ruffle feathers; few these days are actually steeped in what it takes to read a traditional building accurately; both architects and connoisseurs are handicapped by not really knowing the thought processes of the other. This is aggravated by how both subjects are taught.
Architects are taught history courses mostly by art historians. Art historians know little about the actual process of designing a building, so they can only talk about the product --which they connect to the putative inevitability of zeitgeist history-- as you and other intelligent laymen do-- rather than to the design process, which would be far more relevant to their students' education.
So the student is left with a sense of history's irrelevance to his design process. He doesn't know how to use it, because his history professor doesn't either. There's no help from his design profs either; they likewise haven't been taught the connection. It takes someone rigorously trained in art history
and architecture to cross the bridge; that's what makes Robert Stern so effective at what he does.
Having been trained in its methods, a student's design instructors are able to make the connection between
modernist theory and history and the current design process. Consequently so can the students; about modern architecture, they have more to teach their history professors than those professors have to teach the students.
So: history seems dead and irrelevant to the budding architect, while zeitgeist theory relegates it to disreputability --chiefly on the word of architects themselves, their theoreticians and apologists.
The discussion never rises above vague and wholly vaporous assertions of appropriateness and intimations of sleaze. I prefer to take such theories with a large grain of salt, and leave my aesthetic judgments to the evidence of my eyes.
In short, I don't give a rat's ass about the style of a building. If it looks good, does the job it was designed for, improves the context and gives me a little something to ponder, it's OK with me. Sad that so few buildings meet these criteria.
(All the architects are off turgidly being creative.)
