How wonderfully entertaining your last note is Mr. Farris. At least you brought a humorous note to a conversation in which we sometimes take ourselves too seriously. I hope that Mr. Hosack takes it in the spirit
in which it was written.
It occurred to me also that we may have a case of 'the pot calling the kettle black" (for those who are not as ancient as I please substitute "people in glass houses should not throw stones"). I am thinking of your declamatory statement that "a lot of modern architects believe......" Surely you fall into the same trap.
Your discussion of the need for "natural looking materials" in this age of radically new materials and technology smacks a little of Ruskinian romanticism. You bring me back to the childhood of my architectural education when my history teacher explained why masonry houses in one part of the world look different from those in another.Thus he introduced me to geology as well as architecture.
When you mention striped buildings....I think not of suburban strips or even Adolph Loos but of mediaeval Siena, even Firenze.
When you mention your dislike of blue roofs I remember with delight how I first saw Wright's Marin Civic Center and its sky blue hypalon roof, one of the very first uses of that excellent material, on a building that shocks, surprises and delights by its range of challenges to ethics and integrity. That is one blue roof that I would not change to brown tile, shakes or earthy asphalt shingles. I learned late however, not to use hypalon of any color in a cold climate. It is extremely slippery when wet or covered with snow.
I must agree strongly with your appraisal of Gehry. When I first saw his work illustrated I came close to puking, so profound was my horror at his seeming wantonness. When I took it upon myself to visit a number of his buildings, however, I slowly became an admirer of his integrity, his creativity and above all his practical
attitude.
I remember especially a trip to the Vitra complex where I just wanted to see Ando's conference center and move on. I was deeply disappointed in the unconvincing and heavy-handed approach of my hero, Tadao.
I decided to go over to Gehry's furniture museum and have a relieving chortle at its idiocy. Instead I found it to be beautifully and practically planned to do utilize space, movement and light in ways that did justice to
beautiful chairs from Thonet to Eames, from Troy to Trondheim, each one placed by a curator who clearly was in sympathy with the architecture.
Despite its brief life as America House, his Paris building is beautifully scaled to the neighborhood. The Bilbao Guggenheim links City and river gently and decisively. His great concert hall in Los Angeles has acoustics that
are at least equal to those at the Mormon Tabernacle, the Boston Symphony hall and the Troy Music Hall.
It is as stimulating and exciting a place as Nicholas Grimshaw's EMPAC building without, however having the latter's wonderful experimental flexibility.
Gehry and Calatrava and Zumthor and Bohlin and so many others indeed push against the boundaries of thinking in different ways. Ever since Lou Kahn first opened my ears and eyes with his dictum " a space shows how it is made" and Le Ricolais made us experiment with ways in which soap film can illustrate tensility, and Denise Scott Brown questioned everything, I have begun to realize how privileged I am to be able to appreciate the creative energies of so many of these wonderful explorers of the possible.
Each time it happens, whether in seeing a new work or reading a new blog, I realize what Keats meant in
ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER....
"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He gazed at the Pacific and all his men
Silent upon a peak in Darien"
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Patrick Quinn FAIA
Albany NY
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