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.

Inconvenient Truths About the Ice Storm

Like many households in northern New England, ours had been thrown into disarray as the morning of Friday, December 12 arrived. My wife and I had just finished conferring about which of us would stay home from work, since school had been canceled for our resident first grader, when the lights went out, flickered back on for a second, and then plunged the house into sustained darkness.

The physician in the family headed off to the community hospital that employs her, figuring that she would be needed there, and so it fell to me, the resident law professor, to prepare for a day with a preschooler, a first grader and no electricity. As it turned out, hundreds of thousands of my neighbors across New Hampshire and Vermont were in more or less the same situation.

But here is where our story turns distinctly ugly – or, I expect, will seem ugly to many.

My first response, as my wife drove off, was to go back to bed. Leave the snoozing kids undisturbed, I reasoned, and deal with the power crisis after sun-up to save the battery power in our flashlights. This sanguine response proved to be an excellent strategy. Less than an hour after they went out, the lights were back on in our house for good.

Beneath this vignette and, indeed, underlying the devastation wrought by the big ice storms that seem to besiege our region every few years, are truths that go beyond mere inconvenience. They concern the land use patterns that order the most crucial aspects of our everyday lives.

It is our good fortune to live on less than a quarter of an acre, in a home that is within sight of our town’s public library, less than a quarter mile away from the local firehouse, police station, general store and elementary school. As the news reports of the ice storm have poignantly confirmed, it is precisely these densely settled downtown areas that principles of logistics and benefit maximization cause utilities to focus on first when widespread power outages occur.

Conversely, if you have chosen to live in an old farmhouse, on 70 acres of land, miles out of town, at or near the end of a long electricity distribution circuit, it is quite foreseeable that it would take line crews days and days to restore power to you. Your utility, of course, could maintain a sufficiently vast, permanent army of line crews as to assure that all storm-related outages lasted an hour or less, but this would drive rates to ridiculous levels. As it is, the high cost of restoring power to outlying customers will be borne by all of us, as utilities gain regulatory approval to replenish the storm reserve funds they use to confront these weather emergencies.

Situations like these should really cause us to ask how many countryside dwellers really ought to be living where they live. Obviously, if you are a farmer, truly living off the land, you have every reason to reside far from the nearest town or village. Indeed, as New England rediscovers the value of its local economy, we should encourage and subsidize locally owned agricultural land users.

But the rest of us should ask whether the faux-rural existence, however bucolic, is sustainable and sensible if we want our communities to persist over the long term.

I made this point, gently, at a holiday party held at the height of the storm-induced outages, to a colleague of my wife who had been without electricity for several days. Last summer my family had attended her housewarming, which celebrated the purchase of n remodeled 19th Century farmhouse on a bucolic dirt road. My kids swam in her pond; now she and her husband were wondering when they would next get to shower or bathe.

“It was the only house we could afford to buy,” she reported.

This is not surprising, given the widespread use of zoning and planning techniques that discourage high-density, in-town development, in combination with the hidden subsidies (through things like utility rates, “current use” property tax measures, and even road maintenance budgets) for pseudo-rural living.

In a famous 2004 New Yorker magazine article, writer David Owen pronounced Manhattan a “utopian community” and a “model of environmental responsibility” when compared to the rest of America. In a classic example of "do as I say, not as I do" journalism, Owen admitted he had fled a tiny Manhattan apartment in the 1980s for an 18th Century rural Connecticut farmhouse, on a dirt road, amid deer and wild turkeys. He pointed out that if all 8 million New Yorkers lived in communities with the population density of his Connecticut town, it would consume an area as big as all of New England with New Jersey and Delaware thrown in.

That, more or less, is what we are gradually doing to northern New England. It is usually pleasant; my kids loved splashing around in that pond last summer. But sometimes, as with ice storms that decimate overhead electricity distribution systems, this approach to using the land causes widespread misery, or worse. I know that is easy for me to say, as an in-town dweller. It needs to be said anyway.

Architecture Criticism at the Times Devolves from ZAP! to ZZZzzz

Guzzle some coffee and consider this excerpt from architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff's December 14, 2008 New York Times review of a new I.M Pei building, the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar:

The weight of the interior’s chiseled stone forms, with the dome resting on a faceted drum and square base, evokes both classical precedents and the late works of Louis Kahn, whose fusion of modern structure with a timeless monumentality was a turning point in Modernist history.

Mr. Pei’s design lacks the depth and cohesion of Kahn’s greatest work. The structural system that supports the dome, for instance, is not particularly elegant; on one side the drum that supports it rests on slender three-story-tall columns, on the other it extends down to meet a wall that encloses a floor of offices before resting on a series of shorter columns, upsetting the room’s natural symmetry.

Nonetheless the meaning of the space is clear. Mr. Pei has created a temple of high art, placing culture on the same pedestal as religion. His aim is both to create a symbol of Islamic culture and to forge a common heritage for the citizens of Qatar and the region.

The grandeur of the atrium is only a prelude to the real climax: the galleries, which are as intimate as the atrium is soaring. Objects are encased in towering glass cabinets set on tables, giving them an accessibility rare in a major museum. There is also just the right amount of space between the objects — enough to let them breathe without being isolated.

And like the building itself, the collections are a reflection of the notion that Modernity and Islamic culture are not in opposition, but woven out of the same historical thread.

Now savor a few excerpts from Ada Louise Huxtable, the former New York Times architecture critic writing in the Wall Street Journal about the redesign by Brad Cloepfil of the former (and infamous) Edward Durell Stone museum building at 2 Columbus Circle in Manhattan:

I simply do not buy the argument that this little building was a bellwether of the postmodern movement, or that its architect, Ed Stone, was a prophet who made the break with orthodox modernism, as its champions claim. That assertion is specious history. Stone's charming potboiler has been falsely elevated by wishful hindsight. This was never an act of creative insurrection; it was accidental postmodernism, coinciding serendipitously with an awakening interest in more expressive referential and decorative enrichment. Two Columbus Circle was on the down curve of an architect who had done his best work in the 1930s; Stone's stunning A. Conger Goodyear house, in Old Westbury, Long Island, and the first Museum of Modern Art, designed with Philip Goodwin, were radical structures that introduced modernism to this country.

His career was subsequently destroyed by alcoholism, and there was a long, fallow period until a new marriage returned him to sobriety and reinvented him as a new architect, Edward Durrell Stone. We who had known and admired him as Ed Stone were summarily informed by his wife and his publicists that he was to be called Edward Durrell Stone from then on. . . .

Because 2 Columbus Circle is a monolithic, poured-in-place concrete structure, [when Brad Cloepfil reworked Durrell Stone's design] the openings had to be limited and made in a manner that would not affect its structural integrity, a design and engineering feat few have bothered to notice.

Mr. Cloepfil's unusual solution cuts narrow, ribbonlike strips in a tight geometric pattern across the building's surface that continue three-dimensionally through the inside as light slots along ceilings and floors. Running along the tops of galleries and down the walls, the strips frame stunningly focused views of Columbus Circle, Central Park, and the surrounding city. But this three-dimensional concept is not easy to grasp, nor, seen just from the outside, does it seduce the eye. Mr. Cloepfil is a very cool, very restrained architect with a minimalist sensibility; his work is out of sync with a public increasingly desensitized by today's can-you-top-this hypersensationalism and the expectation of in-your-face "icons." From Arabian Nights romance to rigid geometry is a big leap. And something has gone noticeably wrong.

This is a precisely calibrated aesthetic that can be destroyed by one bad move, and that move has been the late insertion of a picture window on the restaurant floor. The client insisted and the architect resisted, and we will never know when and where the relationship fell apart -- but at some point it obviously did, and so did the design. There were other sticking points, but this is the one that counts. The eternal banality of the picture window is forever with us, the lessons of the vignetted view never learned, even as we have developed techniques and materials that make such subtleties possible. We persist in the denial of a visual principle that artists have understood for centuries. Everyone has to sit smack up against the glass.

Even with the building's flaws, however, criticism of the structure has been alarmingly out of proportion and flagrantly out of control. The unreasoning rejection of the solution carried over into a reluctance, or inability, to see anything good about the result.

This is writing, not typing.

Admittedly, as Huxtable points out, her topic is a provocative one; 2 Columbus Circle is highly visible and much maligned in both its present and former incarnations. And Huxtable herself is forever linked to this building's tortured history, having famously described the project in a 1964 review as a "die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops," perhaps second only to Vincent Scully's roughly contemporaneous utterance about the destruction of Charles Follen McKim's Pennsylvania Station ("One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat") in the pantheon of succinct architectural put-downs. So, for Ada Louise to revisit 2 Columbus Circle in print, after 44 years, is itself a real occasion in the history of architecture criticism as written for mass consumption.

Nicolai Ouroussoff in Qatar is not such a moment.

As a general proposition, Ouroussoff's writing is bland and merely descriptive where Huxtable is fiery and provocative. Ouroussoff needs a hard-hearted editor to remind him to show things rather than telling them -- as in his unpersuasive and unembellished characterization of Pei's design in Qatar as ineligant and lacking in the "depth and cohesion" (whatever those qualities are) of the great Louis Kahn.

Since Huxtable is credited with inventing architecture criticism as a form of daily newspaper reportage, the devolution from her to Ouroussoff is especially poignant. Notably, the Times has consistently veered from bold to boring in its architecture criticism. Huxtable's immediate successor was Paul Goldberger, who figured out how to leech all notions of criticism out of his brief as architecture critic. Goldberger's successor was the late Herbert Muschamp, an unrepentent aesthete whose disregard for the real-world implications of his subject was legendary -- as was his hypocrisy, famously illustrated by his praise for Daniel Libeskind as a contender for the World Trade Center plan followed by his condemnation of Libeskind only a few weeks later when one of Muschamp's friends, another finalist, correctly looked to be fading from the lead. Muschamp, however, was nothing if not an interesting read.

Libeskind, of course, won the World Trade Center battle but lost the war -- the irony being that his splendid proposal was as consigned to oblivion as that of any competitor's, except that as the competition winner Libeskind suffered real humiliation in the process. It was, quite naturally, Huxtable who correctly predicted the impending fiasco, long before Muschamp tried to ram his critic's pen through the crystalline tower Libeskind had conjured.

There is nothing that a daily newspaper could comment about or criticize that is of greater practical significance than architecture. It can unleash beauty, and offer comfort, with a power no other art form enjoys. So architecture deserves the kind of conviction-driven, people-oriented, unabashedly opinionated writing that Ada Louise Huxtable has consistently delivered for more than a half century. She has worthy successors in writers like Blair Kamin of the Chicago Tribune, the late Allan Temko of the San Francisco Chronicle, Robert Campbell of the Boston Globe (sometimes), James Gardner (whose overwrought tribute to the old 2 Columbus Circle design, and attendant condemnation of Cloepfil's re-do, was one of his last dispatches for the now-defunct New York Sun), and, best of all, Martin Filler of the New York Review of Books.

It is time for the Times to reclaim its rightful place as the newspaper of record on the subject of separating good architecture from that which is expedient, superficial, dehumanizing, and ugly.