August 7, 2023 On Architecture Anti-Ugly Action By Travis Elborough Chelsea Barracks, by Tripe & Wakeham, 1960–62. “An outstanding exposition of the fact that very big buildings can keep their scale without becoming inhuman.” All photographs by Ian Nairn. It seems no less than highly appropriate that when Ian Nairn’s Modern Buildings in London first appeared in 1964 it was purchasable from one of a hundred automatic book-vending machines that had been installed in a selection of inner-London train stations just two years earlier. Sadly, these machines, operated by the British Automatic Company, were short-lived. Persistent vandalism and theft saw them axed during the so-called Summer of Love, by which time, and perhaps thanks to Doctor Who’s then-recent battles with mechanoid Cybermen, the shine had rather come off the idea of unfettered technological progress. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its malevolent supercomputer HAL 9000, after all, lay only a few months away. And so too, did the partial collapse of the Ronan Point high-rise (a space-age monolith of sorts) in Canning Town, East London—an event widely credited with helping to turn the general public against modernist architecture. State House, Holburn, by Trehearne and Norman, Preston & Partners, 1956–60. “State House is a brave failure.” As it was, Nairn’s book was published in the middle of a general election campaign that saw the Labour Party’s Harold Wilson become prime minister on the promise of building “a new Britain” forged in the “white heat” of a “scientific revolution.” And Modern Buildings in London is, for the most part, optimistic, or least vaguely hopeful, about what the future might bring—or definitely far more so than much of Nairn’s subsequent output. This is an observation rather than a criticism. In many respects, his growing disillusionment with the quality of new buildings in Britain was not unjustified. Modern Buildings in London finds Nairn at the peak of his powers; it is a book studded with as many pithy observations and startling thoughts as cloves in a ham. Not unlike D. H. Lawrence in his essays and travel books, Nairn’s sentences appear almost to jump-start, as if landing halfway through, punchy opinions falling instantly in quick-fire lines shorn of any unnecessary preamble or padding. Like in Lawrence, there is rage here, much of it directed toward the London County Council and their municipal architects and planners. Of the LCC’s handiwork in the Clive Street neighborhood of Stepney, he bluntly states: “I am too angry to write much about it,” before going on to argue that the old streets by comparison had “ten times more understanding of how people live and behave.” Read More
February 8, 2022 On Architecture Structure Is a Design in Light: The Notebooks of Louis I. Kahn By Louis I. Kahn Louis I. Khan, 1956 study for center city Philadelphia, ink on tracing paper. A selection from the architect’s notebooks and drawings, including sketches from his European travels as well as early drafts and finished renderings of his buildings. One day, as a small boy, I was copying the portrait of Napoleon. His left eye was giving me trouble. Already I had erased the drawing of it several times. My father leaned over and lovingly corrected my work. I threw the paper and pencil across the room, saying “now it is your drawing, not mine.” Two cannot make a single drawing. I am sure the most skillful imitation can be detected by the originator. The sheer delight in the act of drawing has its way in the drawing and that also is a quality that the imitator can’t imitate. The personal abstraction, the rapport between subject and the thought also are unimitatable. Read More
March 22, 2018 On Architecture When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Bookstore By Adam Morgan Frank Lloyd Wright. Photo: Yousuf Karsh. In October 1907—a few months after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle horrified Chicago—a new bookstore opened on the seventh floor of the Fine Arts Building downtown. In her autobiography, Margaret Anderson, the founder and editor of The Little Review, called it “the most beautiful bookshop in the world.” But Browne’s Bookstore survived for only five years. In 1908, a visiting Publishers Weekly reporter may have hit upon why: “Thus far, only one dealer in all classes of books has had the courage to locate his store up ‘in the air.’ ” “The air” was the seventh floor. The lone dealer was Francis Fisher Browne, the editor of Chicago’s literary magazine du jour, The Dial, whose offices were located on the same floor. At the time, the Fine Arts Building was the center of Chicago arts and culture. Constructed by the Studebaker Company in 1885 to showcase their horse-drawn carriages, the colorful Romanesque building was remodeled a few years later to gather “the artistic, social, and literary concerns of the city into a single building.” By 1901, it was home to artist studios, theater companies, literary clubs, and more than ten thousand music students. A decade later, it gave birth to Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine, Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review, and the Chicago Little Theatre. With thousands of booklovers moving up and down the stairwells every day, a seventh-floor bookstore didn’t seem like such a terrible idea. “All Chicago society came to Browne’s Bookstore,” Anderson writes. “Here tea was served and everyone was very smart.” Of course, the store’s altitude wasn’t the only reason it gained national attention: every inch of the interior was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright—the shelves, the windows, even the knickknacks. Read More
May 12, 2017 On Architecture Makers’ Markers By Henry H. Kuehn Graceland Cemetery, in Chicago. Toward the north end of Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery, around Lake Willowmere, lies a cluster of graves belonging to the city’s most famous architects, among them Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Fazlur Khan. Henry Kuehn discovered this so-called cemetery of architects while serving as director of the Graceland Cemetery tour, and it sparked a quest to research and catalogue architects’ gravesites all around the country. At the heart of his pursuit was a desire to understand how these monument builders are remembered in death. The results, recorded in Kuehn’s new book, Architects’ Gravesites: A Serendipitous Guide, are as varied as the built structures those men and women left behind. Below is a selection, together with an excerpt from Paul Goldberger’s afterword. —Nicole Rudick To come to the end of this book is to conclude a journey across the United States, across architectural history, and into human character. I am not sure that the final resting places of celebrated and accomplished architects tell us all that much about their work—after all, few of them designed their own burial sites or grave markers, and the graves that most closely resemble the architecture of their occupants were quite often designed by others, sometimes many years later, and some have the forced quality of all-too-earnest homage. But if the design of architects’ gravesites sheds only minimal light on their work, their graves do tell us rather more than we might have expected about these architects as people. Some of them are grand and imposing, others so modest as to be no more than small stone plaques set flat upon the ground. Many architects chose to be buried with their families, and their grave markers confer equal billing to spouses and sometimes other family members. Of course, what most of us want—what most of us turn the pages of Architects’ Gravesites hoping to find—is some kind of echo of the architect’s voice, however many of the architects themselves shied away from expressing it. Clearly the instinct toward modesty arises more often for architects in death than it does in life, since it is hard not to be surprised at how many of these final resting places are small and understated. A successful architect, after all, need not fear that he or she leaves nothing behind: the smallest building is usually larger than the most elaborate grave, and most of these architects have left plenty of buildings, most of which are not at all small, for us to remember them by. —Paul Goldberger Read More
January 29, 2015 On Architecture The Pomegranate Architect By Ray Bradbury Becoming the world’s only accidental architect. From the cover of Sam Weller’s Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. I first met Ray Bradbury while writing a feature story for the Chicago Tribune magazine in 2000, the year he turned eighty, and we quickly bonded over our shared childhood experiences (roughly fifty years apart) growing up in northern Illinois, as well as in Southern California. We had a remarkable number of things in common and a similar sense of curiosity and a joie de vivre, and we began to work together closely, as I became his authorized biographer. For two years, from early 2010 to April 2012, Ray had an essay that he wanted to work on each time we met. It was always one of the first things he mentioned—“Can we work on my architecture essay today?” Despite the fact that he had written about his work in the field of architecture in his book of essays, Yestermorrow, and I had surveyed his work extensively in my biography, Ray was resolved to get the entirety of his creations in the field of architecture down in one essay. He wanted me to submit it to Architectural Digest. The essay was never completed—it was never quite right, because he always had more memories or thoughts he wanted to add to it. And it was rough, having been dictated over many months. Even on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, with guests in the house, he called me into his den and asked me to record a new section. And the very last time I saw him, less than two months before he passed, he asked me again to help him finish it. There was something vital about this essay to Ray Bradbury—he wanted, I think, to prove to the world his influence on the field of architecture. Whatever the case, he very much wanted this essay published. It is presented here and in Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, in rough form, for the very first time. —Sam Weller How did I become an architect? It was all a happy accident. I suspect it began when I was three years old, living in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1923. My grandfather influenced me by showing me architecture. He had pictures of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and of the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. I looked at these pictures through an old stereopticon, a Viewmaster, and I could see all the old, beautiful buildings. When I was five, my grandfather influenced me yet again. And I think this caused me to go on and to eventually influence other people and to start thinking about public spaces and buildings myself. My grandfather was so important. When I was around five years old, he showed me a copy of the magazine Harper’s Weekly. It was an issue from around 1899, and it contained a story by H. G. Wells called “When the Sleeper Wakes.” The story had marvelous illustrations showing the cities of tomorrow. They were so beautiful. I fell in love with those pictures. They burned into my subconscious. Read More