Recently in Architecture Category

Here's a great piece from the new issue of The Atlantic talking about all the experiments in green, affordable housing springing up in hurricane-devastated New Orleans. Bizarrely, the actor Brad Pitt is a huge player in this market. Sounds like he's doing a lot of good there, though I personally side with the rebuilding aesthetic and ethic pushed by Andres Duany, who doesn't go for the modernist and/or non-local-vernacular designs favored by those surrounding Pitt. Duany hits on a brilliant observation about New Orleans in this passage:

"When I originally thought of New Orleans, I was conditioned by the press to think of it as an extremely ill-governed city, full of ill-educated people, with a great deal of crime, a great deal of dirt, a great deal of poverty," said Duany, who grew up in Cuba. "And when I arrived, I did indeed find it to be all those things. Then one day I was walking down the street and I had this kind of brain thing, and I thought I was in Cuba. Weird! And then I realized at that moment that New Orleans was not an American city, it was a Caribbean city. Once you recalibrate, it becomes the best-governed, cleanest, most efficient, and best-educated city in the Caribbean. New Orleans is actually the Geneva of the Caribbean."

Duany said that many of the shotgun houses in New Orleans were built by the fathers and grandfathers of people living in them today, and few of them meet building codes. But no one worries about paying mortgages or insurance. "The situation is that the housing is essentially paid off, and it allows people to accumulate leisure," he said. "What's special about New Orleans is that it's the only place in the United States where you can have a first-rate urban life for very little money." What happened after Katrina, Duany said, was that FEMA and others came to town with detailed requirements for record-keeping and property titles, then insisted on stringent building codes that would make all the houses hurricane-proof. This might seem like common sense, he said, but it's "essentially unworkable for a Caribbean city."

So the central problem, according to Duany: "All the do-goody people attempting to preserve the culture are the same do-gooders who are raising the standards for the building of houses, and are the same do-gooders who are giving people partial mortgages and putting them in debt," he said. "They have such a profound misunderstanding of the culture of the Caribbean that they're destroying it. The heart of the tragedy is that New Orleans is not being measured by Caribbean standards. It's being measured by Minnesota standards."

I'm going to have to think about that for a while: New Orleans as a Caribbean city. More broadly, you could think of South Louisiana, even the non-Cajun parts, as essentially Mediterranean. This is especially visible in the non-Cajun parts, such as where I grew up. Most of us were Protestant, but boy, did we feel different from North Louisiana.

Anyway, this from the article is the best definition of sustainabilty I've ever seen:

Two years ago, at a conference on traditional building held at the New Orleans convention center, the architect and New Urbanist Steve Mouzon asked a crowd of contractors and architects to think about a basic point. "The very core of sustainability," he said, "can be found in a simple question: 'Can it be loved?'"

Think about that as you're driving around your town, city or suburb today. Look at the buildings around you and think about which ones can be loved, and which ones can't. The ones that can be loved are the ones likely to be there 50 years from now. Here in Dallas, we've just opened a couple of big, expensive, starchitect-designed arts buildings. I've not been to either, but neither one looks especially lovable. Cool, but not lovable.

Continuing on a theme this morning, San Francisco writer John King, reviewing a new book about design by Deyan Sudjic, explains why cities continue to have a hold on our imagination, despite the ease of working and living outside of the traditional urban core. Excerpt:

All this should signal a death knell to the traditional core. Instead - recession aside - marquee hubs such as San Francisco stand more desirable than ever. It's not that we need to be here. But the center serves as a stage set, the spotlit focus for people who use urbanity to define themselves and their tribe.

Cities aren't the focus of Sudjic's book, a well-tailored provocation that both explores why the best design work is timeless and decries how it can be debased for status or show. Thomas Chippendale and his 18th century furniture are explored as a precursor to Ikea - "a pioneer in brand creation" - and the ever-shinier line of Apple products is contrasted with the demise of the fountain pen as status symbol ("the basic concept has lost its relevance").

The underlying theme: the quest among designers and clients for "emotional resonance," the design of a watch or a laptop computer that connotes something beyond what it does: "to provide us with a reminder of the world beyond utility."

Which brings us back to downtown San Francisco, where so much of the terrain is fine-tuned to make you feel like something is happening - and that you belong in/to the scene.

More:

"In objects we value the 'authentic,' the hand-pressed. It's often the same thing with cities," Sudjic said in a telephone interview last week. "A (successful) city is about how it feels to be in a particular place, at a particular time."

I like that quote. I would suggest that the reason we love cities, and the reason that we respond emotionally to beauty, has something to do with why my two-year-old daughter spent four minutes watching the Queen of England's coronation, and was absolutely enchanted. There is something in our nature that craves elevation above utility.

(H/T: Wick Allison.)

Three cheers for Prince Charles, for effectively putting the kibosh on a hideous Modernist housing development planned for London. Charles is well-known for his strongly-held view that architectural modernism has in most cases been an anti-human blight on England. To walk through Cambridge and to see the monstrous Modernist carbuncles that have been imposed on that beautiful campus is to instantly sympathize with Charles' crusade. We had an undergraduate punter in charge of our punt one day, and he pointed out some of the more grotesque 1960s and 1970s buildings defacing the Cambridge built landscape, and lamented that those piles were protected under law.

Well. The architecture critic of the Sunday Times of London is in a swivet over the Prince's actions. He's even intemperately invoking the regicidal Oliver Cromwell against the Prince of Wales. Excerpt:

Will the architect get his way and persuade Parliament to re-examine the role of Prince Charles? I think it unlikely that anything will emerge publicly. But, just as Charles can write letters to the government, so the government can write letters to Charles. And it is not impossible that a sterner missive than usual may be drafted soon. Nobody will mention Cromwell. But his statue is there at the Palace of Westminster: a poignant warning to all uppity royals named Charles.

The astonishing thing -- but completely predictable thing -- is that the left-wing Lord Rogers, the architect whose plans have been scotched by the Prince's lobbying, is condemning Charles as a posh snob who is overstepping his constitutional bounds by expressing a negative opinion on Modernist architecture. (and the Sunday Times' architectural critic agrees). This is rich, really rich. It is almost always only elitists who love Modernist buildings; ordinary people find them cold and unfeeling. Indeed, as the National Post reports, the people who actually live in the neighborhood where the modernist Chelsea Barracks were to be built were fighting the thing. Excerpt:

Georgine Thorburn, chairman of the Chelsea Barracks Action Group, which opposes Lord Rogers' scheme, said the architect only had himself to blame for his insensitive and inappropriate designs that she said had failed to comply with the Westminster City Council planning brief.

"What most people don't realize is that it has been the unstinting opposition by the thousands of Chelsea Barracks Action Group supporters that kept the objection campaign alive and it was them who commissioned Quinlan Terry to find an alternative scheme," she told the Times.

"It so happened that the Prince Charles agreed with us and reflected the voice of the people that 121 feet high of steel and glass was inappropriate for this area. Lord Rogers' bitter criticism of the Prince is unfounded; to us he is the people's prince and the only one who seems to stand up for what the people want."

"The Prince is speaking up because he feels local people, aside from anyone else, are not being listened to, and, in any case, the Wren complex is of national importance," added Amanda Baillieu, editor of the weekly Building Design magazine.

Take a look at what the writer A.N. Wilson, who has been a strong critic of Charles in the past, says in defense of the Prince. In the piece, you can see the steel-and-glass vileness Rogers intended to build at Chelsea Barracks, and the beautiful neoclassical alternative plans that now appear to be on instead. Here's a Wilson excerpt:

So when Prince Charles stymied the monstrous Rogers plans, he was speaking for the great majority of the local people.

Twenty-five years ago, when the prince described the proposed modernist development of the National Gallery in London as a monstrous carbuncle, he likewise caused howls of anguish from the architectural establishment.
But he spoke for England. And now he is doing so again. Anti-royalists always suppose that monarchs wish to impose their will arrogantly on a servile people.

Historically, in fact, it has been the role of kings and princes to stick up for the people against the powerful monied bullies - the wicked barons or, in this case, the monstrously arrogant modernist architects.

Read on, this is really good:

Compare and contrast. Wow.

"Pop pop pop," goes the sheetrock.

"Groan groan groan," go the walls.

"Eeerk, eeerk, eeerk," go the 94-year-old windows in their frames.

"Crash boom kerplonk," go the bricks falling out of the decrepit chimney and into the firebox below.

"No es bueno," goes the foreman on the work crew, explaining to me what just happened with the chimney.

Yes, folks, this is foundation repair week chez Dreher. You can make a fortune in the Dallas area doing foundation repair, given the clay soil in these parts. Thank heaven we have a pier-and-beam foundation, not a slab. I can't tell you how weird it is to spend an afternoon with your house literally moving under your feet. No offense to my Golden State readers, but if this is a super-gentle version of an earthquake, you can have California.

Via Doublethink, why do the Chinese call this ultramodernist building "Big Underpants" -- and why does that make the state so angry? The hilarious graphic after the jump shows that it could be worse....

Here's a cool thing going on in the north Texas suburbs: a developer is building Adriatica, a village based on Supetar, a traditional stone village in Croatia. Excerpt: It turns out that Supetar is a gorgeous town of stone homes...

Wonderful essay on Takimag today praising, from a traditionalist conservative point of view, the writer Christopher Alexander, whose "A Pattern Language" explained why certain architecture "works," and other architecture -- especially modern and postmodern buildings -- does not. Excerpt: Alexander...

Fascinating case in Washington, DC, right now, involving an extremely ugly and expensive to maintain church whose congregation can no longer afford its upkeep, and wants to modify it or tear it down. The city has declared it a landmark,...

The reason to move to Dallas is the great people. It's not the climate, and it sure as hell ain't the architecture. This is an ugly city. There are oases of beauty, to be sure, but they only cast into...

I had lunch yesterday with a friend who buys old city buildings and renovates them, mostly for commercial use. He's become as interested in peak oil as I am. He was telling me that he'd just acquired an old apartment...

This is a great story about a family in Los Angeles who created their own semi-rural garden of Eden inside the city by reclaiming a ramshackle dump. Excerpt: In their minds, they saw a magical outdoor space for their growing...

A New Orleans friend e-mailed to say if he was going to build a house, he'd want to build one of these Lowe's Katrina Cottages. They look pretty great, if you're into the Not-So-Big House vibe, like I am....

Every Sunday on the way to church, we pass a construction site in Dallas, east of the expressway, on which a vast new apartment complex has been rising with impressive speed. Our area of town has been coming roaring back,...

If Thomas Kinkade were a crunchy con new urbanist......

I'm still noodling over my next book, in which I want to focus on a few various communities where ordinary people are trying to live out a life of virtue in community. If I get a contract for the book,...