We Complained; Nicolai Listened?

In Latin they call this logical flaw post hoc ergo proper hoc. But it is difficult, nevertheless, to overlook the latest dispatch from Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, castigated in this space recently for tepid rhetoric.

On December 19, in a dispatch entitled "It Was Fun Till the Money Ran Out, Ouroussoff proclaims "the end of one of the most delirious eras in modern architectural history" in which architects like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gery and the duo of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have been celebrated not just in architecture circles but in the culture generally.

But, Ouroussoff continues, "somewhere along the way that fantasy took a wrong turn. As commissions multiplied for luxury residential high-rises, high-end boutiques and corporate offices in cities like London, Tokyo and Dubai, more socially conscious projects rarely materialized. Public housing, a staple of 20th-century Modernism, was nowhere on the agenda. Nor were schools, hospitals or public infrastructure. Serious architecture was beginning to look like a service for the rich, like private jets and spa treatments.

"Nowhere was that poisonous cocktail of vanity and self-delusion more visible than in Manhattan. Although some important cultural projects were commissioned, this era will probably be remembered as much for its vulgarity as its ambition."

Fair enough, although celebrity architects have always tended to find their clients chiefly among the rich. There aren't a lot of public housing projects out there with Frank Lloyd Wright's name on them; Edgar Kaufman, who commissioned Fallingwater, was a Pittsburgh department store magnate. Yes, one entered New York City like a god before they destroyed Charles Follen McKim's grand Pennsylvania Station -- one scuttles in now like a rat, as Vincent Scully famously observed -- but, in its day, the Pennsylvania Railroad was as powerful a corporate empire as any that subsequently employed any of the contemporary designers Ouroussoff lists. Indeed, it has been pointed out that the vaingloriousness of the railroad's president sowed the seeds of the station's demise because he refused to consider mixed use options that would have made the project more economically sustainable.

Meanwhile, current New York architecture projects include Diller & Scofidio's High Line project, which rehabilitates an abandoned elevated railway into a (literally) high flying public park, and Santiago Calatrava's World Trade Center transit hub, shrinking by the minute but still a viable last stand for public architecture at the site.

Any fair reckoning of the phenomenon Ouroussoff condemns would have to hold architecture criticism as responsible as any of the referenced celebrity designers, all of whom have garnered substantial attention in the Times while more virtuous projects (using purely the standards mentioned in Ouroussoff's column) by less well-known architects were ignored. It's time for writers such as Ouroussoff to start thinking less like art critics and more like social commentators.