ablarc
November 14th, 2003, 10:29 AM
ARCHITECTS TO ADMIRE
There are many architects to admire. Some that I find particularly interesting are (in no particular order):
Claude-Nicholas Ledoux: purveyor of the butchest Classicism; steam-hammer architecture with a surreal edge:
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Ledoux lived at the time of the French Revolution. Though his architecture appears to embody the severely puritanical and revolutionary ideals of the Revolution, he in fact worked for the King (Louis XVI). The king had a monopoly on salt, which is a necessity of life. The preceding project was a salt mine rendered as an ideal city, a kind of company town (Chaux, Arc-en-Senans).
Not only did the king control the production of salt, he also taxed it when it was brought into Paris. To get into the city it had to pass through a toll barrier, where the King could exact his tax. Ledoux designed these toll barriers. Most were destroyed by popular action, while Ledoux narrowly escaped the guillotine. Here is a survivor, the Barriere de la Villette:
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Christopher Wren: sometimes glib, because too prolific, but brilliant when inspired, such as Radcliffe Camera and Sheldonian Theatre (Oxford) or Royal Naval College, Greenwich.
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Eero Saarinen: the chameleon of modern architects; no two buildings similar, the exact opposite of Richard Meier in this regard.
Gustave Eiffel: an engineer with an architect’s grasp of beauty. Besides, the Tower, see also the Viaduc de Garabit and the bridge in Oporto.
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Edwin Lutyens: split personality, like his contemporary, Bernard Maybeck; I don’t know which is more interesting, his homey but rigorous Tudor houses or his grandiose Roman classicism (New Delhi):
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Lutyens had little faith in governments
"Governments are inherently incapable of appreciating what is perfect. In the name of the pragmatic and the practical, they choose the second best and end up with the third."
Philibert de l’Orme: caught perfectly on the cusp of the transition from Flamboyant Gothic to Italian Renaissance; never has an architect so deftly combined two styles and made them one.
Leon Krier: a great urban theorist whose small-scale built opus is invariably interesting, if not to everyone’s liking:
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Krier: Chapel in Windsor, Florida
Thomas Jefferson: the refined taste of a true gentleman and connoisseur defined the Federal Style; the University of Virginia, in its use of section and topography is nothing short of brilliant and propels Jefferson into the front rank of professional American architects; on top of this, it is Romantic and Utopian.
http://66.230.220.70/images/post/architects-i-admire/22u.jpg
Luis Barragan: elemental architecture; modernism stripped beyond its essentials to raw form; Mies with a Latin heart.
Charles Follen McKim: for having designed the two greatest interior spaces in American history and the greatest American building ever demolished.
http://66.230.220.70/images/post/architects-i-admire/22v.jpg http://66.230.220.70/images/post/architects-i-admire/22w.jpg
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but only for his houses, Tugendhat and Farnsworth:
http://www.farnsworthhousefriends.org/
http://architecture.about.com/library/blmies-farnsworth.htm
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Le Corbusier, but only for Ronchamps, which is sublime, and the Swiss Pavilion, which is sleek.
Frank Lloyd Wright: the great self-promoter needs no kind words from me; he provided plenty for himself. Still…a pretty decent architect.
Addison Mizner: Mediterranean Revival houses, hotels, shopping streets and planning in Palm Beach and Boca Raton, Florida. Houses:
http://66.230.220.70/images/post/architects-i-admire/22yc.jpg http://ablarchitecture.com/images/tom/architects-i-admire/22yd.jpg
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“Poets are born, not fed.” –Addison Mizner
Shopping streets in the city of Palm Beach, pretty much conceived and designed by Mizner:
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John Nash: another great master of pastiche, and perhaps the most successful of commercial architects. His Regent street was so lucrative (facades as wallpaper) that most of it was torn down in short order and replaced with even bigger commercial blockbusters, but his lasting legacy remains Regent Park and its splendid whipped-cream condo-palaces --and of course the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. Could there be a Disney World Main Street without him?
Cesar Pelli, for regaling us these many years with a ravishing collection of well-considered skyscrapers, including Bank of America (Charlotte) and International Financial Center (Hong Kong, below), and hopefully soon, the South Station Tower.
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H. H. Richardson: a master of massing and composition, who specialized in balance without symmetry.
James Gamble Rogers: the superstar of pastiche; no one has ever mastered the assembly of historical styles as consummately as this architect of Yale’s colleges.
Raymond Hood: Without a doubt the greatest architect of Deco skyscrapers, with a hit parade that includes Rockefeller Center, the Chicago Tribune, McGraw-Hill, the Daily News and the American Radiator Building.
Irving Gill: Dare to be simple, regular, rely upon Nature to supply the irregular contrast.
C.F.A. Voysey: home the way Beatrix Potter would want it; cozy domesticity can not possibly be warmer without melting into stage design, as it did in the hands of his imitators, including many in the United States:
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Richard Meier: an architect who seemingly cannot design a building that is not beautiful, though with the Getty Museum he comes close. http://forums.wirednewyork.com/viewtopic.php?t=1912
Frank Gehry: the wunderkind of crumpled tinfoil, whose recent works are ravishingly beautiful. http://forums.wirednewyork.com/viewtopic.php?t=1353
Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh: together and individually raised classicism to dizzying expressionistic heights at Castle Howard, Blenheim Palace, Seaton Delaval, various churches and even the façade of Westminster Abbey (that we all think of as medieval).
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Michelangelo: simply the most accomplished architect of all time, because the greatest draughtsman. Uncorked the Baroque by showing how to complicate the Classical style.
Andreas Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who almost single-handedly restored sanity and common sense to town planning. Kudos to Seaside, Kentlands and many others.
John Soane: a Classical architect with a peculiarly modern sensibility:
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Louis Kahn: his Salk Institute rivals Guggenheim Bilbao for most beautiful building of the Twentieth Century, imo. The buildings at Exeter are not too shabby either.
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Salk Institute
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Kimbell Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Oh, oh: Palladio!
Quinlan Terry: “I don't think we can ignore the Modern Movement. But I wouldn't have minded at all if it hadn't happened. I think the world would be a much nicer place.”
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Quinlan Terry: Richmond Riverside, London
http://home.btconnect.com/erithandterry/1024index.html
Norman Foster, maybe.
http://forums.wirednewyork.com/viewtopic.php?t=1791
Renzo Piano: designed in London what is arguably the most beautiful skyscraper of recent years, though it may never be built:
http://66.230.220.70/images/post/architects-i-admire/27.jpg
London Bridge Tower. The NIMBYs are out in full force on this one. They say it will ruin the skyline. lol. Upper photo shows London skyline if currently-pipelined projects are built, including Piano’s tower; lower photo shows present skyline (from SSC.com):
http://66.230.220.70/images/post/architects-i-admire/28a.jpg
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Richard Rogers: better than Norman Foster, better than Renzo Piano, because more of a zealot than either. http://forums.wirednewyork.com/viewtopic.php?t=1960
There are many other architects to admire, including Borromini and Mansart, Fischer von Erlach, Charles Garnier, Hector Guimard, Antoni Gaudi, and the anonymous architect of King’s College, Cambridge, who produced the most beautiful building that I have ever seen with my very own eyes:
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Inside of King's College Chapel, Cambridge
By William Wordsworth
Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense,
With ill-matched aims the Architect who planned--
Albeit labouring for a scanty band
Of white-robed Scholars only--this immense
And glorious Work of fine intelligence!
Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore
Of nicely-calculated less or more;
So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense
These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof
Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells,
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells
Lingering--and wandering on as loth to die;
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality
But most of all I think I admire Andrea Palladio, as have so many architects in the past, for his utter reductionist rigor that produces such expressive and pure beauty that it has to be experienced in person for the full effect:
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Villa Barbaro, Maser (above).
Palladio’s greatest urban work is the Basilica (really the City Hall) buried in the heart of Vicenza. Like Faneuil Hall, it has commercial on the ground floor and its plaza is the scene of a produce market:
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One side is uphill from the other. A tunnel burrows through:
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The upper level is a public loggia with views of the city and access to the City Council:
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The façade is composed entirely of Palladian motifs, like Philip Johnson’s absurdist parody, International Place:
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San Giorgio Maggiore is a monastery on an island in the Lagoon of Venice. The Group 7 Industrialized nations met here when Carter was president. A more serenely beautiful place can hardly be imagined, as guests of the exclusive Cipriani Hotel discover. The hotel shares the island:
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The Villa Malcontenta is quite simply the most beautiful house I have seen, and I have seen Fallingwater, the Villa Savoie, Johnson’s Glass House, Monticello, Biltmore, San Simeon and others:
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This house has two fronts: classical temple on the canal from which it was approached from Venice by the owners and their guests, and Farmhouse from the fields that provided the estate with sustenance:
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The piano-nobile floor is tamped earth, waxed and overlayed on massive, lower-level groined vaults:
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Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza: an indoor Roman amphitheatre:
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Rotonda! Just one elevation!! Rabbits and sheep in the yard; the ultimate farmhouse:
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The Villa Rotonda has more in common with the (Mies) Farnsworth House than with Fallingwater. It is single-mindedly dedicated to doing less, architecturally. For example, it has only one elevation; even the Farnsworth House has two (not counting mirror images); and it is symmetrical about all axes, including diagonals. Any architect will tell you this is hard to do, much less sell to a client; even Palladio only did it once, probably just to see if he could.
Total mathematical rigor extends to harmonic whole number proportions of all parts (rooms, walls, etc.) based on simple progressions in the Fibonacci series leading to the Golden Mean. This also is hard to do. The theory is that since this proportion is ubiquitous in nature, we are visually conditioned to find it beautiful, because familiar –like our predilection for octaves or fifths in music, also mathematically based (1:2 and 2:3).
Also, the house has no decoration; as in the Farnsworth House, 100% of what you see is structure. You could say that given the structural system, the building designed itself (“I asked the building what it wanted to be” –Kahn). If you said that, Palladio would be pleased. This contrasts with Wright’s willful imposition of personal whim and wishes upon his (also very beautiful) opus. Wright’s approach is arbitrary and baroque; Palladio’s is classically self-effacing in the extreme; he lets the self-generating order of pure mathematics take over. Mathematics, like God, is eternal. There will always be Number, even if only One (or Zero).
Finally, you need to approach this house in person to see how brilliantly it interacts with its site. You can see it from miles away as a nipple that sits on the tit of its modest but overwhelmingly dominant hilltop, from which it surveys (and is surveyed) for miles around, like the pivot of its [the] universe.
Palladio was looking for a way to box eternity. This building is utterly static, like the Almighty, you might say (“I change not,” saith the Lord). It is utterly uninterested in the dynamic or in any form of change. It is determined to sit on top of its hill forever, and because it is so beautiful, it probably will.
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Well, those are some of my favorite architects. What are yours?
There are many architects to admire. Some that I find particularly interesting are (in no particular order):
Claude-Nicholas Ledoux: purveyor of the butchest Classicism; steam-hammer architecture with a surreal edge:
http://66.230.220.70/images/post/architects-i-admire/01.jpg
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Ledoux lived at the time of the French Revolution. Though his architecture appears to embody the severely puritanical and revolutionary ideals of the Revolution, he in fact worked for the King (Louis XVI). The king had a monopoly on salt, which is a necessity of life. The preceding project was a salt mine rendered as an ideal city, a kind of company town (Chaux, Arc-en-Senans).
Not only did the king control the production of salt, he also taxed it when it was brought into Paris. To get into the city it had to pass through a toll barrier, where the King could exact his tax. Ledoux designed these toll barriers. Most were destroyed by popular action, while Ledoux narrowly escaped the guillotine. Here is a survivor, the Barriere de la Villette:
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Christopher Wren: sometimes glib, because too prolific, but brilliant when inspired, such as Radcliffe Camera and Sheldonian Theatre (Oxford) or Royal Naval College, Greenwich.
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Eero Saarinen: the chameleon of modern architects; no two buildings similar, the exact opposite of Richard Meier in this regard.
Gustave Eiffel: an engineer with an architect’s grasp of beauty. Besides, the Tower, see also the Viaduc de Garabit and the bridge in Oporto.
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Edwin Lutyens: split personality, like his contemporary, Bernard Maybeck; I don’t know which is more interesting, his homey but rigorous Tudor houses or his grandiose Roman classicism (New Delhi):
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Lutyens had little faith in governments
"Governments are inherently incapable of appreciating what is perfect. In the name of the pragmatic and the practical, they choose the second best and end up with the third."
Philibert de l’Orme: caught perfectly on the cusp of the transition from Flamboyant Gothic to Italian Renaissance; never has an architect so deftly combined two styles and made them one.
Leon Krier: a great urban theorist whose small-scale built opus is invariably interesting, if not to everyone’s liking:
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Krier: Chapel in Windsor, Florida
Thomas Jefferson: the refined taste of a true gentleman and connoisseur defined the Federal Style; the University of Virginia, in its use of section and topography is nothing short of brilliant and propels Jefferson into the front rank of professional American architects; on top of this, it is Romantic and Utopian.
http://66.230.220.70/images/post/architects-i-admire/22u.jpg
Luis Barragan: elemental architecture; modernism stripped beyond its essentials to raw form; Mies with a Latin heart.
Charles Follen McKim: for having designed the two greatest interior spaces in American history and the greatest American building ever demolished.
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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but only for his houses, Tugendhat and Farnsworth:
http://www.farnsworthhousefriends.org/
http://architecture.about.com/library/blmies-farnsworth.htm
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Le Corbusier, but only for Ronchamps, which is sublime, and the Swiss Pavilion, which is sleek.
Frank Lloyd Wright: the great self-promoter needs no kind words from me; he provided plenty for himself. Still…a pretty decent architect.
Addison Mizner: Mediterranean Revival houses, hotels, shopping streets and planning in Palm Beach and Boca Raton, Florida. Houses:
http://66.230.220.70/images/post/architects-i-admire/22yc.jpg http://ablarchitecture.com/images/tom/architects-i-admire/22yd.jpg
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“Poets are born, not fed.” –Addison Mizner
Shopping streets in the city of Palm Beach, pretty much conceived and designed by Mizner:
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John Nash: another great master of pastiche, and perhaps the most successful of commercial architects. His Regent street was so lucrative (facades as wallpaper) that most of it was torn down in short order and replaced with even bigger commercial blockbusters, but his lasting legacy remains Regent Park and its splendid whipped-cream condo-palaces --and of course the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. Could there be a Disney World Main Street without him?
Cesar Pelli, for regaling us these many years with a ravishing collection of well-considered skyscrapers, including Bank of America (Charlotte) and International Financial Center (Hong Kong, below), and hopefully soon, the South Station Tower.
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H. H. Richardson: a master of massing and composition, who specialized in balance without symmetry.
James Gamble Rogers: the superstar of pastiche; no one has ever mastered the assembly of historical styles as consummately as this architect of Yale’s colleges.
Raymond Hood: Without a doubt the greatest architect of Deco skyscrapers, with a hit parade that includes Rockefeller Center, the Chicago Tribune, McGraw-Hill, the Daily News and the American Radiator Building.
Irving Gill: Dare to be simple, regular, rely upon Nature to supply the irregular contrast.
C.F.A. Voysey: home the way Beatrix Potter would want it; cozy domesticity can not possibly be warmer without melting into stage design, as it did in the hands of his imitators, including many in the United States:
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Richard Meier: an architect who seemingly cannot design a building that is not beautiful, though with the Getty Museum he comes close. http://forums.wirednewyork.com/viewtopic.php?t=1912
Frank Gehry: the wunderkind of crumpled tinfoil, whose recent works are ravishingly beautiful. http://forums.wirednewyork.com/viewtopic.php?t=1353
Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh: together and individually raised classicism to dizzying expressionistic heights at Castle Howard, Blenheim Palace, Seaton Delaval, various churches and even the façade of Westminster Abbey (that we all think of as medieval).
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Michelangelo: simply the most accomplished architect of all time, because the greatest draughtsman. Uncorked the Baroque by showing how to complicate the Classical style.
Andreas Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who almost single-handedly restored sanity and common sense to town planning. Kudos to Seaside, Kentlands and many others.
John Soane: a Classical architect with a peculiarly modern sensibility:
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Louis Kahn: his Salk Institute rivals Guggenheim Bilbao for most beautiful building of the Twentieth Century, imo. The buildings at Exeter are not too shabby either.
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Salk Institute
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Kimbell Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Oh, oh: Palladio!
Quinlan Terry: “I don't think we can ignore the Modern Movement. But I wouldn't have minded at all if it hadn't happened. I think the world would be a much nicer place.”
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Quinlan Terry: Richmond Riverside, London
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Norman Foster, maybe.
http://forums.wirednewyork.com/viewtopic.php?t=1791
Renzo Piano: designed in London what is arguably the most beautiful skyscraper of recent years, though it may never be built:
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London Bridge Tower. The NIMBYs are out in full force on this one. They say it will ruin the skyline. lol. Upper photo shows London skyline if currently-pipelined projects are built, including Piano’s tower; lower photo shows present skyline (from SSC.com):
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Richard Rogers: better than Norman Foster, better than Renzo Piano, because more of a zealot than either. http://forums.wirednewyork.com/viewtopic.php?t=1960
There are many other architects to admire, including Borromini and Mansart, Fischer von Erlach, Charles Garnier, Hector Guimard, Antoni Gaudi, and the anonymous architect of King’s College, Cambridge, who produced the most beautiful building that I have ever seen with my very own eyes:
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Inside of King's College Chapel, Cambridge
By William Wordsworth
Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense,
With ill-matched aims the Architect who planned--
Albeit labouring for a scanty band
Of white-robed Scholars only--this immense
And glorious Work of fine intelligence!
Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore
Of nicely-calculated less or more;
So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense
These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof
Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells,
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells
Lingering--and wandering on as loth to die;
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality
But most of all I think I admire Andrea Palladio, as have so many architects in the past, for his utter reductionist rigor that produces such expressive and pure beauty that it has to be experienced in person for the full effect:
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Villa Barbaro, Maser (above).
Palladio’s greatest urban work is the Basilica (really the City Hall) buried in the heart of Vicenza. Like Faneuil Hall, it has commercial on the ground floor and its plaza is the scene of a produce market:
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One side is uphill from the other. A tunnel burrows through:
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The upper level is a public loggia with views of the city and access to the City Council:
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The façade is composed entirely of Palladian motifs, like Philip Johnson’s absurdist parody, International Place:
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San Giorgio Maggiore is a monastery on an island in the Lagoon of Venice. The Group 7 Industrialized nations met here when Carter was president. A more serenely beautiful place can hardly be imagined, as guests of the exclusive Cipriani Hotel discover. The hotel shares the island:
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The Villa Malcontenta is quite simply the most beautiful house I have seen, and I have seen Fallingwater, the Villa Savoie, Johnson’s Glass House, Monticello, Biltmore, San Simeon and others:
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This house has two fronts: classical temple on the canal from which it was approached from Venice by the owners and their guests, and Farmhouse from the fields that provided the estate with sustenance:
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The piano-nobile floor is tamped earth, waxed and overlayed on massive, lower-level groined vaults:
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Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza: an indoor Roman amphitheatre:
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Rotonda! Just one elevation!! Rabbits and sheep in the yard; the ultimate farmhouse:
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The Villa Rotonda has more in common with the (Mies) Farnsworth House than with Fallingwater. It is single-mindedly dedicated to doing less, architecturally. For example, it has only one elevation; even the Farnsworth House has two (not counting mirror images); and it is symmetrical about all axes, including diagonals. Any architect will tell you this is hard to do, much less sell to a client; even Palladio only did it once, probably just to see if he could.
Total mathematical rigor extends to harmonic whole number proportions of all parts (rooms, walls, etc.) based on simple progressions in the Fibonacci series leading to the Golden Mean. This also is hard to do. The theory is that since this proportion is ubiquitous in nature, we are visually conditioned to find it beautiful, because familiar –like our predilection for octaves or fifths in music, also mathematically based (1:2 and 2:3).
Also, the house has no decoration; as in the Farnsworth House, 100% of what you see is structure. You could say that given the structural system, the building designed itself (“I asked the building what it wanted to be” –Kahn). If you said that, Palladio would be pleased. This contrasts with Wright’s willful imposition of personal whim and wishes upon his (also very beautiful) opus. Wright’s approach is arbitrary and baroque; Palladio’s is classically self-effacing in the extreme; he lets the self-generating order of pure mathematics take over. Mathematics, like God, is eternal. There will always be Number, even if only One (or Zero).
Finally, you need to approach this house in person to see how brilliantly it interacts with its site. You can see it from miles away as a nipple that sits on the tit of its modest but overwhelmingly dominant hilltop, from which it surveys (and is surveyed) for miles around, like the pivot of its [the] universe.
Palladio was looking for a way to box eternity. This building is utterly static, like the Almighty, you might say (“I change not,” saith the Lord). It is utterly uninterested in the dynamic or in any form of change. It is determined to sit on top of its hill forever, and because it is so beautiful, it probably will.
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Well, those are some of my favorite architects. What are yours?