Monday, June 16, 2014

OCTOGENARIAN ARCHITECTURE (Part 1 of 2 Parts)

“The four stages of man,” Art Linkletter once observed, “are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.” 

While this bromide may well describe the lives of media stars and child prodigies, I’m happy to report that it seldom applies to architects. While many may grow old, few, it seems, grow irrelevant. In fact, most great architects hadn’t even hit their stride until midlife, and many kept going strong into their nineties.

Frank Lloyd Wright, still dapper at 91
Frank Lloyd Wright is of course the poster child for architectural longevity, yet there were surely times in Wright’s life when he doubted his own relevance. He’d begun his career with a bang, devising his brilliant Prairie Houses during the first decade of the 1900s, while he was still in his thirties. But by the time he completed Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel in 1923, his commissions had tapered off considerably. By normal career standards Wright, by then in his late fifties, should have been contemplating retirement. In any case, by the mid-1930s, his organic architecture was already being eclipsed by a younger generation of modernists, whose sleek International Style creations seemed even more advanced than Wright’s work had been. 

Yet it was just at this seeming twilight in his career that Wright staged a spectacular comeback. In 1937 he completed  the Edgar Kaufmann house (Fallingwater), a lyrical conception seemingly meant to outdo the International Style modernists at their own game. It was Bauhaus modernism with a heart and soul. Acclaimed worldwide, Fallingwater relaunched Wright’s career in the seventh decade of his life, unleashing a creative flurry that continued unabated until his death at 91.

Wright’s late-life renaissance isn’t at all unusual among architects, however. The first generation of International Style architects also had lengthy careers marked by equally late triumphs. After his famous stint as director of the Bauhaus, for example, Walter Gropius (1883-1969) came to the United States and, in 1945, when he was already in his sixties, founded The Architects Collaborative (TAC). It was soon to become one of the world’s most successful and respected architecture firms. Moreover, Gropius was nearly eighty when he completed New York’s Pan Am building with Pietro Belluschi (he lived to be 86). 

Le Corbusier's astonishing chapel at Ronchamp,
one of his latest and greatest works...
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) completed New York’s Seagram Building--a work often ranked among the pinnacle achievements of modern architecture--when he was in his early seventies. 

Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, 18887-1965) had a long and influential career, but arguably his greatest work--the lyrical chapel he designed at Ronchamp--was completed only when he was in his late sixties.  No doubt Le Corbusier, too, might have remained productive into his eighties, had he not ignored his doctor’s orders and gone for a swim in the Mediterranean Sea, where he apparently suffered a heart attack and drowned at age 77.

---and the architect in his seventies: We wish he'd listened
to his doctor.
Curiously, while the first-generation modernists recounted above held fast to their convictions for the duration of their long and distinguished careers, some of their equally venerable successors renounced modernism in their later years--refuting the idea that old age breeds inflexibility. We’ll look at some of those long careers next time, as well as a few others that were cut tragically short.

Monday, June 2, 2014

NO THINKING ALLOWED


A while back, I was half-listening to a radio talk show when a guest’s comment struck me like a bolt from the blue. New York Times Magazine columnist Lisa Sanders, a practicing physician, was talking about the basic problem with America’s health care system. What caught my attention was the following statement:

“Thinking, which is really what a doctor does--thinking, examining, questioning-- is not valued by the system. We value doing rather than thinking.” 

At a single stroke, her words solved a mystery most architects grapple with for the whole of their professional careers: Why so few people understand what architects do, and why it takes us so long to do it. 

Citing an example in her own profession, Sanders described a day during which she’d seen a slew of patients with very complex medical issues, capped by a routine, twenty-minute procedure to remedy an ingrown toenail.  Later, to her surprise, she found that the medical insurers had paid her more money for the toenail procedure than for any of the more complex cases. This , Sanders believes, is because those cases required less action but lots of thought--time the insurance company didn’t value and wasn’t willing to pay her for.

Architects are a far cry from doctors, but we do face a similar problem. Most people envision us sitting rapt at drafting tables or computers, busily drawing blueprints. But the fact is that the most valuable part of our service is when we sit around and do nothing. That’s right--we don’t draw, we don’t research, we don’t talk: we just plain think. And, as Sanders notes, that’s the problem: We’re not used to putting much value on thinking. 

We Americans are a take-charge bunch, after all, and we’re leery of people who think too much. As that corporate clothing giant is always urging us: Just do it. Don’t waste time thinking, in other words--just go and buy gobs of our products. The danger of this viewpoint is self evident, since most of the stupid and tragic things we experience in our lives, whether car accidents, wars, or recessions, are precisely because someone “just did it” instead of thinking first. 

Unfortunately, the amorphous process of mulling over a problem is just the part of our work people aren’t too keen to pay for. Once, when I delivered a set of plans to a client along with my bill, he turned to me with unconcealed annoyance and asked: “So these two sheets of paper cost me three thousand dollars?” No doubt there have been many more folks who kept the same thought politely to themselves.

Faced with such reactions over the years, I’ve always hoped to explain how the real work was not in the roll of paper itself, but in the thought behind it--in the hours upon hours spent evaluating countless possibilities to close in on the one best solution. This never really seemed to register, and after hearing Dr. Sanders exclaim, “Thinking is not valued,” I guess I  know why.