Reflections on being crazy and having no soul
I just got my
DVD of "Lost Buildings". Lovely, just lovely.
This American Life is easily one of the greatest things of this generation.
Go order a copy and support the program... and watch this thing. Chris Ware's illustrations are perfect, and the story is, true to form, improbable, touching, funny and sad.
There's a scene where Mies is drawn as Mr. Magoo. Excellent.
I can't help but be reminded of my college days, when Kent Bloomer, my eccentric mentor, would tell us all about Sullivan's work, the meaning of ornament, the humanism that has been lost from architecture. I'll say this for the sake of the blogosphere and posterity: The Yale curriculum of architectural history circles around a premise about architecture that suggests buildings are alive, that they're mysterious and something to be taken seriously, existentially. Harvard's program, by contrast, eliminates Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Gothic period, and every trace of postmodernism (but maybe that one's worth skipping). The GSD has a ruthless, rational approach to architecture, aiming at an evisceration of emotion, a triumph of reason uber alles*; Yale (at least in the early 90s, before Bob took over... can't speak for it now) tries/tried to recover an emotional element, not an irrationality exactly but something that has to do with the aesthetic idea of the Sublime. Think: Paul Rudolph. And that's what Moore, Venturi et al were really after, some element of
us in
there. Misunderstood movement, that postmodernism. Perhaps if their buildings weren't so damn ugly...
[This reminds me of one of my favorite school moments. Mohsen Mostafavi was director of the GSD M.Arch program when I applied, and at the open house he was asked what he thought of Yale's program in comparison to the well-known competitiveness and rigor of the GSD. He answered, "Yale has a great program, and the community there is very supportive. The professors really care about their students, and after a review they'll sometimes even hug each other. But I was on a review there recently, and the work was really terrible. Maybe they're doing too much hugging?"]
Architecture is both an expression of reason and an irrational manifestation of the soul. You shouldn't isolate one line of thinking from the other (see * below). Lately I've come to believe in a Taoist kind of way that architecture is everything and nothing. It's a medium and an elemental fact. It's a fundamental part of any civilization and also just disposable fashion. It's a
reflection, profound and meaningless at the same time. I think that's why I (and maybe others) have always had a hard time with form-making; you can't just go tell a reflection what it is. That is, unless you're either crazy (Sullivan, Gehry, MVRDV...) or soul-less (Gropius, Rem, Meier...).
[Maybe here's where I should build a new critique that identifies the presence of garlic in architects' diets, and the resulting soulfulness of their work...]
* The "Mystic Southerners," as we called them (Mack, Sambo, Chris Risher, even Jim Williamson...) were on their way out when I got to the program. They seemed to straddle the line between the two schools of thought well. Wish they weren't purged from the program. Just as in fiction, there's a creative something to the South that reveals an understanding about human nature so much richer than any of us non-Southerners could hope for.
* Ray, 3/28/2006 11:58:00 PM
