with the rodents that live in the thatch, we opt out. The American psyche is ambivalently pro-wilderness; once we have secured and insulated our own sanitized, electrified Cape Cod ranch, we dislike all further building. Nothing looks uglier than a construction site, with its bulldozer-scarred boulders and tangled stumps and muddy cellar holes where a few days ago green woods sheltered a few frolicking squirrels and raccoons. There is no downward statistic as pleasing as a slump in the number of housing starts.
A healthy hatred of our own species animates, I believe, the most spirited architectural criticism. Faithful readers of
The New Yorker
have for decades nodded agreement with the witty fulminations of the late Lewis Mumford and now of Brendan Gill against those two inevitable manifestations of a burgeoning metropolis, skyscrapers and expressways. Gill sees nefarious developers conspiring with imbecilic city officials to obliterate the human-scaled charms of the X-rated blocks of 42nd Street, and Mumford saw in Boston’s own Storrow Drive a ruinous sacrifice of riverbank to that vile creature from outer space, the automobile. As if peoplewere not in those automobiles, and had not irrevocably demonstrated their preference for driving over walking.
Are superhighways good or bad architecture? Photographed from above, surely, they have their cloverleafy beauty, though a lot of real clover got paved over. Was Baron Haussmann the creator of the City of Light as we know it, or was he the ruthless razer of vast irreplaceable tracts of medieval Paris? He was both. Is the skyline of New York City any less deserving of romantic rhapsodies than another product of blind upthrust like the Himalaya Mountains? Only if a mud hut is less deserving than an anthill. Is architecture, finally, in the mass (as distinguished from the leaky, inconvenient set pieces of tyrannical maestros like Wright or Le Corbusier), too big, too brute, too tied to money and the popular will, to be judged? I recently saw on television some aerial photographs of a giant futuristic hive of streets and houses in Arizona called Sun City. There it sat, a huge human excrescence sucking water out of the ground and pouring carbon dioxide into the air. It was monstrous. It was beautiful.
Speaking of Wright, is the Guggenheim Museum good or bad architecture? Its shape—a top, in layers, of the ugliest of materials, poured concrete—affronts sedate Fifth Avenue. A spiralling ramp within, it is like no other museum. This singularity can be both admired and deplored. It sticks in the mind; it wakes us up. Within, the viewing space, at a perpetual tilt and open on one side to a man-made abyss, quite fails to give us and the works on display the sense of hushed enclosure, of a casketlike eternal preservation, that the rooms of the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick do. The problems of mounting and lighting weren’t solved in Wright’s design and all the doctoring since has left the paintings still wallflowerish. And yet, we see them twice—once up close, within the limits of the guard wall, and again across the great round atrium, where they take on the intense brightness of miniatures. We slowly spiral along, dazed and amused. Though poor in treasure, the museum attracts tourists. It is a stunt, but why shouldn’t architecture be a stunt? What are Baroque churches but an accretion of stunts? Isn’t one duty of architecture, as of fashion in clothing, simply to be different—to give us a sense of change and renewal in our lives? Showmanship would seem to be part of the architect’s equipment, along with a careless faith that the accomplished work will be viewed from a variety of angles. Architecture does not imitate nature, it adds to it, and, as with nature, the aesthetic effectlies with the beholder. Once a thing exists, especially if it is big, we learn to live with it, and judge it as leniently as we judge ourselves.
Is New York City Inhabitable?
N EW Y ORK is
A healthy hatred of our own species animates, I believe, the most spirited architectural criticism. Faithful readers of
The New Yorker
have for decades nodded agreement with the witty fulminations of the late Lewis Mumford and now of Brendan Gill against those two inevitable manifestations of a burgeoning metropolis, skyscrapers and expressways. Gill sees nefarious developers conspiring with imbecilic city officials to obliterate the human-scaled charms of the X-rated blocks of 42nd Street, and Mumford saw in Boston’s own Storrow Drive a ruinous sacrifice of riverbank to that vile creature from outer space, the automobile. As if peoplewere not in those automobiles, and had not irrevocably demonstrated their preference for driving over walking.
Are superhighways good or bad architecture? Photographed from above, surely, they have their cloverleafy beauty, though a lot of real clover got paved over. Was Baron Haussmann the creator of the City of Light as we know it, or was he the ruthless razer of vast irreplaceable tracts of medieval Paris? He was both. Is the skyline of New York City any less deserving of romantic rhapsodies than another product of blind upthrust like the Himalaya Mountains? Only if a mud hut is less deserving than an anthill. Is architecture, finally, in the mass (as distinguished from the leaky, inconvenient set pieces of tyrannical maestros like Wright or Le Corbusier), too big, too brute, too tied to money and the popular will, to be judged? I recently saw on television some aerial photographs of a giant futuristic hive of streets and houses in Arizona called Sun City. There it sat, a huge human excrescence sucking water out of the ground and pouring carbon dioxide into the air. It was monstrous. It was beautiful.
Speaking of Wright, is the Guggenheim Museum good or bad architecture? Its shape—a top, in layers, of the ugliest of materials, poured concrete—affronts sedate Fifth Avenue. A spiralling ramp within, it is like no other museum. This singularity can be both admired and deplored. It sticks in the mind; it wakes us up. Within, the viewing space, at a perpetual tilt and open on one side to a man-made abyss, quite fails to give us and the works on display the sense of hushed enclosure, of a casketlike eternal preservation, that the rooms of the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick do. The problems of mounting and lighting weren’t solved in Wright’s design and all the doctoring since has left the paintings still wallflowerish. And yet, we see them twice—once up close, within the limits of the guard wall, and again across the great round atrium, where they take on the intense brightness of miniatures. We slowly spiral along, dazed and amused. Though poor in treasure, the museum attracts tourists. It is a stunt, but why shouldn’t architecture be a stunt? What are Baroque churches but an accretion of stunts? Isn’t one duty of architecture, as of fashion in clothing, simply to be different—to give us a sense of change and renewal in our lives? Showmanship would seem to be part of the architect’s equipment, along with a careless faith that the accomplished work will be viewed from a variety of angles. Architecture does not imitate nature, it adds to it, and, as with nature, the aesthetic effectlies with the beholder. Once a thing exists, especially if it is big, we learn to live with it, and judge it as leniently as we judge ourselves.
Is New York City Inhabitable?
N EW Y ORK is
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