Commentary & Criticism

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Forty thousand people die every year in auto accidents in the United States — 400,000 every decade. Far, far more than have died from terrorism in this country. But we do not respond by withdrawing the right to drive. Images © Werner Huthmacher The new U.S. embassy in Berlin sits next to Brandenburg Gate, but is set back from the street (top); In a rendering (above), MRY shows an intention to capture the spirit of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s work. It’s an analogy that occurs to me whenever I see the latest field of bollards or other barriers in front of

One of the few to appreciate his work consistently was Banham who, in The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment got it just right, citing: “Paul Valery’s contrast between Eupalinos, the architect, and Tridon, the shipwright. The former was preoccupied with the right method of doing the allotted tasks, and deploying the accepted methods of his calling, and seemed to find a philosophical problem in every practical decision. Tridon, on the other hand, applied every technology that came conveniently to hand, whether or not it was part of the shipbuilding tradition, and treated the sayings of philosophers as further instruction on

One of the results of the current Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art is the rediscovery of historical prefab housing on the opposite coast.

In the summer of 1967, my mother and I traveled to Montreal to see the Expo.

Years ago, in Washington, D.C., I had dinner with Peter Blake. Peter was at that time teaching architecture at Catholic University. But he was best known as a journalist— a former editor of Architectural Forum and the founding editor of Architecture Plus, two of the best architecture magazines of the 20th century. Photo © Paul Warchol Harvard plans to tear down Werner Otto Hall (top and above), an addition to the Fogg Museum, rather than repair its exterior walls. Peter also wrote books, and books were the subject of our dinner. He spoke of a famous series of articles in

Making new demands It’s important to understand that this kind of sophisticated climate control was still fairly new at the time Otto was designed. Art conservators were making demands that neither the world of architects nor the world of engineers and contractors had quite caught up with. Okay, that’s the art guys’ story. The weather guys—the architect, his engineering consultants, and the builder—created pretty much the kind of wall they’d always built. Its primary purpose was not to nurture the art but to keep out the weather. They built a cavity wall, a sandwich of materials including a vapor barrier.

The conjunction this season of four architecture exhibitions on Midcentury Modernism at its most promising and exuberant seems less a coincidence of timing than proof of a new attitude, telling us much about the present even while illuminating the past. This transcontinental grand slam began in New York in June with Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through September 21); continued in July with Between Heaven and Earth: The Architecture of John Lautner, at Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum (through October 12), and Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, at the Museum of Modern

Even when Saarinen’s designs were gratuitously exhibitionistic, they never descended into mere styling, which cannot be said of the work of his year-younger contemporary John Lautner, who outlived him by more than three decades. Lautner has been posited as America’s answer to Oscar Niemeyer, the Brazilian master whose critical status has had its ups and downs during his hundred-year life span. Both these architects are superficially alike in their flair for creating sculpturally arresting structures that relate to dramatic natural settings without exactly accommodating them. Beyond that, it’s apples and guavas. Photo © Joshua White (top): Courtesy the Estate of

All those bollards and barriers are described as necessary for security. But in fact they’re dealing with only a single threat: car bombs. There are, obviously, other kinds of terrorism: biological; electronic (in which the enemy disables computer systems and records); or even, in the worst case, nuclear. When you lock the door against one kind of terrorism, another one may open. I’m not an expert in security, but I’d guess that the most useful antiterrorist weapons don’t require the defacing of architecture. These are, surely, intelligence, surveillance, and redundancy. Photos © Werner Huthmacher The embassy’s neighbors include Gehry’s DZ