New York, New England, New Marlborough

by John Massengale Posted on November 16, 2013

ONE of the many great things about New York City is that it’s easy to get from New York to many great places. We tend to head northeast to New England.

The Berkshire mountains in Western Massachusetts are distinctly not in New York, even though many New Yorkers visit the Berkshires. There are many beautiful ways to drive there, none of which require getting on an interstate highway. You can make the trip in 2 hours, or you can make it take all day. There are also trains to Dutchess County, New York, and people are working on a reviving the old rail line, which still has daily freight trains.

OldNorthNewMarl

Old North Road, New Marlborough, Massachusetts

Continue reading →

Posted in New England, New York, Pedestrian, Personal, Urbanism, Veritas et Venustas | Comments Off on New York, New England, New Marlborough

Glass House Conversation: Traditional versus Modern

by John Massengale Posted on February 11, 2013

A YEAR OR SO AGO, I was invited to take part in a discussion on Traditional and Modern architecture at theglasshouse.org that was framed like this:

Traditional versus modern architecture; Proponents of traditional architecture cite a preference for historical styles. Modernist proponents, myself included, prefer architecture that responds to its larger contemporary context.

Where do you stand on the traditional versus modern debate, and why? Is there a contemporary compromise?

My response, below, was to talk about the architecture of time versus the architecture of place:

800px-Glass_House_2006

My interest here is not about style. I like all sorts of towns, cities and buildings, but what I design are Classical buildings and traditional towns and cities.

“Classical” does not mean “traditional” (or “neo-traditional”), and Classicism is a way of designing rather than a style. Most of the market doesn’t want ideological purity, and when it does, the bias is likely to be towards traditional.

More to the point, I grew up in the suburbs but I live in Manhattan, and what I’m most interested in is the design of walkable places. To talk about that in the context of this discussion, I think it’s better to talk about an architecture of place versus an architecture of time than about style.

The architecture of time is the architecture of the Zeitgeist, the theory that has sustained Modernism for well over 100 years. Frank Lloyd Wright was born just after the Civil War and designed important houses in the 19th century, and Modernism was the dominant cultural expression in America as soon as World War II ended. I think that time has ended.

The architecture of time has produced many great buildings, but it comes with two large caveats. One, its rate of return is terrible: for every Ronchamps or Bilbao there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of very bad buildings. Great Modern design is hard to teach, and the emphasis on experimentation and “unprecedented reality” produces many experimental failures (“Architecture is invention. All the rest is repetition and of no interest,” Oscar Niemeyer said). Moreover, the architecture of time also includes all the Modernist shopping centers, strip malls, spec office buildings and the like.

Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Classical, Culture, Current, New Urbanism, Street Design, Urbanism | Comments Off on Glass House Conversation: Traditional versus Modern

WSJ: “An American Renaissance Gem”

by John Massengale Posted on December 10, 2008

vizcaya
“An American Renaissance Gem, How an industrialist
and his unlikely team built a Miami marvel”
The Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2006; Page P13
Book review by John MassengaleVizcayacover

Vizcaya, An American Villa and Its Makers
By Witold Rybczynski and Laurie Olin
Penn Press, 274 pages, $34.95

Some of our greatest buildings are not as well known as they should be. How many people outside of Atlanta are aware of Swan House, the best design by that city’s best classical architect, Philip Trammell Schutze? And if you haven’t been to Miami, you probably don’t know the Villa Vizcaya, a country house that is the equal of any in America.

Both houses, like many of the best American buildings and neighborhoods, were built roughly a century ago during the time of the American Renaissance and City Beautiful movements. The American Renaissance was a “rebirth” of classical art and architecture in the U.S.; the City Beautiful was an urban design and reform movement. The Depression slowed both American Renaissance and City Beautiful, and World War II brought them to a halt. When the war ended, modernism had vanquished their traditional architecture and urbanism.

To the winners go the spoils: Histories of early 20th-century American art and architecture were written by modernist proponents who criticized the achievements of the American Renaissance and City Beautiful designers or ignored them altogether. The preservationist James Marston Fitch, founder of the historic-preservation program at Columbia University (the first and most prominent preservation program in the U.S.), spoke for many when he dismissed the American Renaissance as “an aesthetic wasteland,” populated by buildings that were “a reactionary application of eclecticism” that “ultimately smothered all traces of originality.”

Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers, by architect Witold Rybczynski and landscape architect Laurie Olin, is one of a number of popular and scholarly histories that in the past two decades have sought to redress this ideological imbalance. Mr. Rybczynski and Mr. Olin judge the villa as they find it today and in the context of the historical process that produced it, rather than through a filter of modernist criteria. Contrary to Fitch’s judgment, they find that the eclectic team that built Vizcaya produced a work of great and original beauty.

Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Classical, Culture, News & Reviews, Veritas et Venustas | Comments Off on WSJ: “An American Renaissance Gem”

You Can Lead A Bore To Culture, But You Can’t Make Her Think

by John Massengale Posted on September 25, 2008

This was originally posted on my old blog Veritas et Venustas in September 2008. I’m not reposting most of my old political commentary from there, but I’m making an exception for this one because it starts to get into an important issue: Modernist architecture is usually not progressive today, and traditional design is not necessarily conservative. Just ask President Obama.

With apologies to Dorothy Parker

PalinWink STEVE SCHMIDT and his Rovian crew have transformed the Obama – McCain contest by dropping Sarah Palin into it — and then doing that voodoo they do do so well. “At some point during the past week, the Republican ticket flipped. Sarah Palin became the principal candidate in the general election, with John McCain her much-diminished running mate,” Toronto’s Globe and Mail accurately reported today. “’It’s an astonishing and unprecedented development in American presidential politics,’ MSNBC’s political journalists blogged Friday on their First Read website.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Classical, Culture, Current, Veritas et Venustas | Comments Off on You Can Lead A Bore To Culture, But You Can’t Make Her Think

Urban Architecture & An Architecture of Place

by John Massengale Posted on April 18, 2008

CitiField has no city, and the Metropolitans have no metropolis.

Citifield
OVER AT DESIGN OBSERVER, the great Michael Bierut wrote a good piece on baseball parks that I thought was a little too quick to equate traditional design with “nostalgia” while asking the question, “Why is it so hard to build a baseball stadium that looks like it belongs in the 21st century?”

In the comments, I said,

Michael,

I suspect you’re trolling here, but I’ll bite a little bit.

Why are you assuming that the architecture of the 21st Century should be the same as the architecture called for by 19th century architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies Van Der Rohe?

They wanted a Zeitgeist architecture, an architecture of time, which they tied to the expression of technology. The architecture needed today, I believe is the architecture of community and place. And sustainability.

There was a time when Modernism accurately expressed our culture, but that time is past. It is now nothing more than an expression of style, and that expression is increasingly ego-centric, anti-urban and unsustainable.

We need buidings that add up to the creation of good places. Extensive studies by Chris Alexander, Space Syntax and many others increasingly show that the qualities that do that are timeless and universal.

My standard for judging CitiField is not whether or not it’s nostalgic, but whether or not it’s a good place. That’s determined by many qualities including the spatial experience, the proportions of the facades, the quality of the materials, etc.

(continued)

Fenway is the best park because it’s the best spatial experience, not because it’s the oldest park. It has a sense of enclosure that the modem columnless stadiums will never have. Google “Phil Bess” and “Save Fenway Park” to read more about that.

Wilpon told the architects of CitiField to make it like Ebbets Field, where the Dodgers played. But then he put the field in the middle of a parking lot. As a Brooklyn boy, he should have known better.

Ebbets Field was firmly embedded in the urban fabric of Brooklyn. The team got its name because their fans had to “dodge” streetcars to get to the field. But CitiField has no city, and the Metropolitans have no metropolis. They should play on the Atlantic Yards site, where there are 5 or 6 subway lines and the LIRR. Their urban locations are part of what make Fenway and Wrigley the two best fields.

Someone mentioned that the old Busch stadium sat well in downtown St. Louis. That’s right. And of all the concrete “donut” stadiums built in the 1960s, it’s the one that had the spatial intimacy and sensitive renovations to make it a great place to watch a game.

As I said, I’m talking about an architecture of place, not an architecture of time.

Originally posted: John Massengale on April 18, 2008 04:51 PM on Veritas & Venustas

Posted in Architecture, Classical, Culture, Current, New Urbanism, New York, Pedestrian, Urbanism, Veritas et Venustas | Comments Off on Urban Architecture & An Architecture of Place

Second Annual Slouching Towards Alphaville Award

by John Massengale Posted on March 23, 2007

An old post from Veritas & Venustas:

Zaha Hadid, Moscow Expocenter, 2007
Zaha Hadid, Moscow Expocenter, 2007

It’s cold. It’s winter. It’s minus 20 degrees, an arctic wind is blowing in from the Russian steppes, and you’re walking on the biggest street in Moscow. Above you in the swirling snow loom three towers that increase the wind chill factor to minus 50 degrees. All the vokda in Russia won’t fix this picture.

Haha Hadid? No no Nanotchka! (from the Broadway Follies of 2007)

Zaha Hadid, Moscow Expocenter, 2007
Like ants to the slaughter.

 

Posted in Architecture, Current, Joke, Pedestrian, Street Design, The Other Kind, Urbanism, Veritas et Venustas | Comments Off on Second Annual Slouching Towards Alphaville Award

WSJ: “Building for Beauty”

by John Massengale Posted on November 19, 2006

“Building for Beauty”bottoncover
The Wall Street Journal
November 18, 2006; Page P11
By John Massengale

The Architecture of Happiness
By Alain de Botton
Pantheon, 280 pages, $25

CLOSE to halfway through The Architecture of Happiness, populist philosophe Alain de Botton finally gets to his central point, when he quotes Stendahl: “Beauty is the promise of happiness.” For much of the 20th century, Modernism denied this connection between beauty and happiness. But in the 21st century, architects, artists, scholars and critics are returning to the subject. Mr. de Botton’s book is an interesting and perhaps important addition to the debate over the emotional effect that our cities and buildings have on us.

Thinkers have begun approaching the subject from many directions. Christopher Alexander, an architect and mathematician, explores the intersection of beauty, the senses and feeling in his four-volume series “The Nature of Order.” Israeli architect and professor Yodan Rofe walks people around his country’s cities, recording their sense of well being as they stroll. The result: Specific locations consistently made people feel better or worse. In a book called “Emotional Design,” computer science professor Donald Norman analyzes, as his subtitle has it, “Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things.”

Now joining this burgeoning area of study is Mr. de Botton, the Swiss-born author of “How Proust Can Change Your Life” (1997), a fixture on British television who lives in London. Taking architecture seriously, he writes, means acknowledging the importance of our surroundings, even “conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper.” The buildings we admire, he says, are ultimately those that refer, whether through materials, shapes or colors, to such positive qualities as friendliness, strength and intelligence.

Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Classical, Culture, News & Reviews | Comments Off on WSJ: “Building for Beauty”

V&V: Yankees To Ask New York For $300 Million For Stadium Work

by John Massengale Posted on August 8, 2004

When the richest team in baseball asks New York City and New York State for $300 million to stay in a place they would never leave (they are the Bronx Bombers, after all, about to set an all-time major league attendance record), the City has to ask what it’s getting in return.

BXterminalMarketIf it’s getting a better city and a better neighborhood, then the investment might be worthwhile. And since the area between the Stadium and the Harlem River is a pedestrian DMZ — with an Interstate highway, dilapidated surface parking and the crumbling Bronx Terminal Market that’s about to be redeveloped by the Related Companies — it’s a good situation for the city to look into.

What’s required is that we make sure the city’s plan is mainly about the city, not just about better parking lots or even primarily about keeping the Bombers in the Bronx.

In 1998, I led an urban design studio at the University of Miami, the leading New Urban architecture school. We looked at the building of a new stadium as an opportunity to extend the city fabric of the Bronx from its ragged edge along the elevated subway to the banks of the river, where there will be new railroad and ferry stops. Using the traditional urban method of mapping streets to guide future development, the students made plans to inexpensively connect the river with the heart of the Bronx, a few short blocks away, where the Bronx County Building sits on the Grand Concourse.

Several of the students called their neighborhood "Yankee Village." Today, the Hon. Aldolfo Carrion, Bronx Borough President, has plans for a Yankee Village that will most likely be built. Carrion has a Master’s in Urban Planning and worked for the New York City Department of Planning, and the plan has reportedly had a high priority for his office.

For more information on the neighborhood, Carrion’s Yankee Village, and the students’ work, click here, here and here.

AerialToday

Carrion’s plan hasn’t been released to the public yet, but with Carrion’s background, we should expect it be better than his predecessor’s Yankee Village, announced late in 1998. That was something of a Potemkin Village: not like the Cadillac dealerships, but like the elaborate, false–front villages Catherine the Great’s Minister Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin built to impress the Empress on her tours of the Ukraine and the Crimea.

The 1998 Yankee Village design surrounded Yankee Stadium with parking structures decorated with facades that made the garages look like buildings filled with people rather than cars. The garages also cut the stadium off from the blocks between stadium and the river.

A real village is a walkable neighborhood with a mix of uses: stores, offices, houses and apartments. And real urban design is about making streets, squares, parks and places, not buildings.

Traditionally this was done in New York by the City "mapping" the streets: all of Manhattan above 14th Street was drawn in the famous New York Commissioner’s Plan of 1811, although many of the streets were not built until 4 or 5 decades later. In the outer boroughs, many of the streets were built by developers, but to the plans and specifications of the city.

This system broke down after World War II, when architects and social reformers instituted massive housing projects that reinvented the form of the city with "superblocks" and the tower-in-park model invented by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. These Urban Renewal projects made the building more important than the street and the public realm. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New Yorker Jane Jacobs called them "Urban Removal" and "Towers in Parkings Lots."

In their Yankee Village plans, the University of Miami students went back to the traditional design of streets and squares, and the location of civic and commercial buildings, to make a new neighborhood that knits back together the lost section of the Bronx between the Harlem River and the Stadium.

All of the plans used large, warehouse-like structures similar to the abandoned warehouse next to the Deegan Expressway to mask the noise and disruption of the interstate. Two of the plans used a new train station with a Grand Concourse that went under an elevated section of the highway to seamlessly connect the cities on both sides of the highway: most pedestrians using the station wouldn’t even know the highway was there.

One of the plans took the approach of Manhattan’s new Westside / Joe DiMaggio Highway, saying that as the highway entered the city it must act in a civilized way, coming down off the elevated bridge and transforming itself into an elegant boulevard. Others took advantage of the unusual covered space under the highway used by the Bronx Terminal Market. And one plan put the stadium on a podium that spanned the highway and the multiple railroad tracks, similar to Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal for the west side of Manhattan and the Jets’ stadium.

All of the plans looked at the larger context. From the point of view of the city, it was considered essential to reclaim the waterfront for public use, as President Carrion is proposing. Plans were also made for a new Metro North station convenient to I-87 and north of the George Washington Bridge, a perennial bottleneck for traffic. With that station, commuters from towns not served by Metro North could conveniently park and ride before coming into the heart of the city.

Posted in Architecture, Baseball, Beauty, Classical, Culture, Education, Good Kind, New Urbanism, New York, Urbanism, Veritas et Venustas | Comments Off on V&V: Yankees To Ask New York For $300 Million For Stadium Work

V&V: Making A Neighborhood Around Yankee Stadium — Designs By University of Miami Architecture Students

by John Massengale Posted on August 1, 2004

These are the plans referred to in the post above. They were designed by architecture students at the University of Miami in 1998. Click on the plans for larger images.

From that post, Yankees To Ask New York For $300 Million For Stadium:

A real village is a walkable neighborhood with a mix of uses: stores, offices, houses and apartments. And real urban design is about making streets, squares, parks and places, not buildings.

Traditionally this was done in New York by the City “mapping” the streets: all of Manhattan above 14th Street was drawn in the famous New York Commissioner’s Plan of 1811, although many of the streets were not built until 4 or 5 decades later. In the outer boroughs, many of the streets were built by developers, but to the plans and specifications of the city. . .

In their Yankee Village plans, the University of Miami students used the design of streets and squares, and the location of civic and commercial buildings, to make a new neighborhood that knits back together the lost section of the Bronx between the Harlem River and the Stadium.

 

Three
Moving the Stadium Across the Street — As The Yankees Are Proposing
One
Rebuilding the Stadium Where It Is Now
Two
Rebuilding the Stadium Where It Is Now
TwoB
Rebuilding the Stadium Where It Is Now — Detail
Four
Moving the Stadium to a Podium on the River
The Stadium Is Modeled on the Coliseum in Rome

Posted in Architecture, Beauty, Classical, Culture, Current, Education, Good Kind, New Urbanism, New York, Urbanism, Veritas et Venustas | Comments Off on V&V: Making A Neighborhood Around Yankee Stadium — Designs By University of Miami Architecture Students

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

by John Massengale Posted on March 18, 2004

2016: VIRGINIA WOOLF was one of my first posts on Veritas et Venustas, almost exactly ten years ago. I would write it a little differently today, because the ideas I wrote about then have moved forward over the last decade. Visit hip spots in lower Manhattan and Williamsburg and I think you’ll that as a group the young are neither anti-Traditional nor anti-Modern. And while 10 years ago I described myself as a Classical architect, today a looser, more eclectic Classicism seems as attractive and viable as the purer Classicism that many of my friends practiced then (hence the name of this blog, and the first post here). My friend and colleague Andrés Duany is working on a book he calls Heterodoxia Architectonica to expand the Classical canon.

“Everything changed in December 1910,” Virginia Woolf famously wrote, and there are tipping points and turning points like that we sometimes recognize. In 1848, democracy swept across the European continent (often forcefully beaten back by authoritarian governments). [& Konrad Oberhuber predicted this] [& today on the first day of 2023, authoritarian governments around the world are trying to subvert democracy, even here in America—just as they did 100 years ago.]

I’m old enough to remember when the civil rights movement turned a decisive corner in the early 1960s to become an idea supported by the majority of Americans. In The Best and the Brightest David Halberstam wrote that the turning point for opposition to the Vietnam war came when Walter Cronkite first criticized the conflict on the CBS nightly news. And I can point to the exact minute when peace, love, long hair, and marijuana arrived at my high school later in the 60s, radically transforming it overnight.

Woolf was talking about full-blown Modernism arriving in her upper-middle-class circles. The most evident sign was an emphasis on individual freedom. For many, this meant an emphasis on greater social and economic mobility that foreshadowed a broadening of democracy. For Virginia and her friends, the downside sometimes meant becoming proto-Modernists of the worst sort: depressed, self-involved, and destructively promiscuous.* Nominally-Socialist but obnoxiously superior upper-middle class intellectuals.

Non-architects might wonder why there are so many references to Modernism in Veritas et Venustas (Truth and Beauty). That is an important question, because a) normal people (that is, non-architects) often don’t recognize the problem, and b) I’m not anti-Modern. I’m an architect educated in the 20th century who’s made more than my share of pilgrimages to the masterpieces of Modernism like Fallingwater and Bilbao, and I once wrote an article on how to visit the buildings of Le Corbusier scattered all over Europe, with details such as how to stay in the hotel in the Corb-designed Unité d’Habitations in Marseille.

The answer to the question is two-fold. 1) At the beginning of the 21st Century we are at a new tipping point, which 2) the entrenched interests of the architectural establishment are fighting tooth and nail. Having argued for a hundred years that Modernism is the only appropriate expression of the time, they can’t accept that the culture has moved on to become eclectic and diverse.

For me, a Classical architect and a New Urbanist, this is restraint of trade. Representatives of my union, the American Institute of Architects, frequently work against my interests. The architecture critic of my hometown paper, the New York Times,** constantly argues against everything my colleagues and I do (and he’s joined in that by virtually every architecture critic in the country.) My students at Notre Dame, Georgia Tech, the University of Miami, and the Institute of Classical Art & Architecture tell me I’m a very good teacher, but almost no university in the northeast wants to hire me, because most architecture schools are ideologically Modernist. Somehow, they claim this is in the cause of pluralism.

BUT, and this is an important “but,” their ideological exclusivity is increasingly esoteric and unpopular. There’s no question that society in general has turned a corner.

Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Classical, Culture, Current, Urbanism, Veritas et Venustas | Comments Off on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Muschamp on Ground Zero: It’s Houston, And We Have A Problem

by John Massengale Posted on February 22, 2004
SNØHETTA, 911 Memorial Museum Main Entrance, New York, New York. 2014.
SNØHETTA, 911 Memorial Museum Main Entrance, New York, New York. 2014.

THE MAIN ENTRANCE to the 911 Memorial Museum looks like the exit from a cineplex in a suburban shopping mall. It is unworthy of New York and a sad commentary on how little we achieved at Ground Zero after a decade of discussion and enormous amounts of public funding. (Photo taken in June 2014)

REPOSTED from Veritas et Venustas:

I didn’t always disagree with Herbert Muschamp, it just seemed that way. The articles had so many different ideas and threads, that there were frequently good ideas in many of the columns.

Muschamp once explained the multiplicity of ideas in an autobiographical article he wrote for Art Forum, when he explained that he had 7 “voices” for writing (all of them unhappy and female), and that he tried to use at least 2 or 3 in every thing he wrote.

His Ground Zero article for the Times may have been the first to point out that the LMDC was building Houston on the Hudson. Many others followed, as it became more and more obvious as the plans were developed.

How did we end up in Houston? That is the burning question raised by a new set of design guidelines for the office towers at ground zero. True, we’ve got a hole the size of Texas sitting down there in Lower Manhattan. But how did ground zero come to inherit a vision of glitzy, structurally inept towers that would look more at home in an office park for energy companies in Space City U.S.A.?

Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Culture, Current, New York, News & Reviews, The Other Kind, Urbanism, Veritas et Venustas | Comments Off on Muschamp on Ground Zero: It’s Houston, And We Have A Problem

Harvard’s architects say: How about us?

by John Massengale Posted on December 19, 2003

The Boston Globe is online at http://boston.com/, and the article “Harvard’s architects say: How about us?” can be bought from the online archives for $2.95. I have put selected portions of the article below.

By Alex Beam, Globe Columnist, December 18, 2003

The people who read the Harvard tea leaves — let’s call them Harvardologists — duly noted the absence of an architect from the World’s Greatest Graduate School of Design on the newly formed task forces president Larry Summers has appointed to map out Harvard’s march across the river into Allston.

Most notably there is no Harvard architect on the committee assigned to “envision the ways in which Harvard’s Allston planning can contribute to a lively residential urban community.” This group is also supposed to “explore options for housing graduate students and others.”

It is as if they were building a new chapel and didn’t put someone from the religion department on the planning committee,” my informant comments.

The word on the street is that Summers has had more than his fill of GSD architecture mavens, who greeted the newly arrived president with Rem Koolhaas’s bizarre “Moses Scheme” for rechanneling the Charles River near Harvard. More recently the GSD championed the Ugliest Building Ever Built, the near-universally reviled 1 Western Avenue, a 235-unit housing facility for students, faculty, and staff in Allston. Both members of the design team of Machado and Silvetti have GSD connections. Jorge Silvetti and partner Rodolfo Machado teach at the school.

A Harvard spokeswoman knocks down the antiarchitect conspiracy theory advanced here. “There is no linkage between 1 Western Avenue and the selection of the task force members,” Lauren Marshall explains. “Membership of each committee reflects broad representation from within the university to help generate a collaborative vision of the planning assumptions. Their objective is to discuss and enhance the planning assumptions, and to give academics’ perspectives on the priorities and programs that will drive the physical planning.”

Posted in Architecture, Education, New England, The Other Kind, Urbanism, Veritas et Venustas | Comments Off on Harvard’s architects say: How about us?