Show some respect
It’s never wise to be critical of a building seen only in photographs, but I have to agree with the first part of the first sentence of David Cohn’s article on Herzog & de Meuron’s Caixaforum in Madrid [June 2008, page 108]: “Few protected historic structures have been treated with less respect …” Floating the poor old building off the ground, walling up its windows, debasing its gables with the bloody chunks set on top—it’s been quite awhile since I was last so repulsed by something apparently considered so significant in the brave new world of architecture. The interiors are likewise hard to judge with confidence, but stainless-steel floors reflecting random swags of cold fluorescent tubes appear willfully and decadently repellent as well.
Visits I have made to London’s now presumably tame Tate Modern were impressive primarily for the nobility of the original building and less so for the renovation architects’ inept entries and despair-inducing bare fluorescents against black ceilings. Frightening renderings of the next phase’s stack of glazed shards bode further ill for the building’s fate.
Have others hesitated to speak out regarding this firm’s so often cheerless pursuit of neo-Industrial-Rococo, commissioned avidly by boards of directors as clueless as the profession in general in our perhaps slightly desperate search for that oxymoron, the meritorious avant-garde?
Way out
While I enjoyed Alastair Gordon’s feature article “True Green” on the counterculture architecture of the 1960s and ’70s [April 2008, page 78], his implication that true sustainability died out along with the hippie movement is amusing. His socialistic sensibilities seemed offended by the failure of the left to effect radical changes in American society and what he feels would have been commensurate improvement in sustainable building practices and lifestyle choices. The author might be enlightened by a reexamination of the excesses of the Woodstock generation and the level of environmental excellence achieved by the Communist block since the Summer of Love. As for Gordon’s lament that the sustainability movement is now mainstream, I would suggest that the adoption of a single, modest green policy by an Exxon, General Motors, or Merck benefits society and the environment more than all the dome huts and arcologies ever built.
Creation havoc
We are very offended by the Critique that Martin Filler wrote in the June issue of your magazine [page 51]. Filler blasted the Creation Museum, not because of design flaws, but because of its stand on God’s Word (as a side note, the Creation Museum has won awards because of its architectural design). You allowed this writer to express antireligious opinions in what is supposed to be an architectural magazine—can you imagine if he was to review the design of a Mosque and made anti-Muslim remarks?
I am an architect and long time reader of your magazine. I am responding to Martin Filler’s Critique in your June 2008 issue. I must start by applauding his honesty and willingness to write his mind and heart about well-known projects and architects, especially when he is being critical. I believe that takes real courage. I especially find it refreshing when someone is willing to cite a different and sometimes seemingly minority opinion of major projects that have been and will be published by your magazine. He mentioned one architect’s “angry letter” when he criticized one of his projects. I suppose that comes with the territory.
However, my critique of his Critique has nothing to do with architecture. It has to do with the current liberal mindset to use a medium such as yours to demean another’s own personal beliefs. In this article, Filler comments on several new museums and adds his honest but sometimes harsh opinion. He carefully warns that he is highly opinionated, arbitrary, and so on. However, when he commented on the recently built Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, by A.M. Kinney Associates, he spent his entire section making fun of its contents and essentially stating that if you believe in creation as a means to explain the universe’s origins, you are unscientific and mentally disturbed.
I find Filler highly irresponsible to use his journalistic privilege to tout his own misguided beliefs. Even more disturbing, he never mentions anything about the actual architecture or any architecturally related comment as he did with each of the other seven museums. This is highly offensive to me as a Christian and staunch creationist as well as an embarrassment to architectural record, which I would hope would be tolerant of other mindsets without making fun.
Lean and green
Elizabeth Farrelly’s Commentary, “Beyond Blubberland: In the land of the super plenty” [April 2008, page 57], is a powerful cathartic and grabbed my attention with a kind of fatal fascination. I’m a leaner, greener kind of guy, so with me, she is preaching to the choir. Her use of “collective solipsism” does freak me a bit. Isn’t that an oxymoron? Can you have a group made up of solitary self-existences? “Complementary solipsism” works better for me. Is Farrelly concerned about church architecture or that man himself has changed from a pawn of God into a container for God’s kingdom? Inventing a new religion to replace solipsism is not a good idea; much of our problems of today arise from having too many religions already. What would be of more help is for public religions to wane while the genie of religion is put back into the bottle of the individual human psyche. The result would be a world of natural environmentalists, motivated from within to understand our planet and our place on it. I’m not worried that mega churches are just better lighted barns; I’m worried that they exist at all.
Corrections
A photograph of 1775 Broadway, New York, which Gensler has proposed to reclad [June 2008, Record News, page 34] should have been credited to Woodruff/Brown Architectural Photography. The headline for an article on the Rolling Huts by Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects [April 2008, page 134] stated that the project is in rural Montana. As the body text of the story correctly indicates, the huts are actually located in Washington State. Due to an editing error, part of a phrase in the fifth paragraph of Martin Filler’s Commentary [June 2008, page 51] was cut. The correct text can be found at: http://archrecord. construction.com/features/critique/0806critique-1.asp.
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© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All Rights Reserved
© 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All Rights Reserved