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When an architectural competition was announced for the New York Public Library on May 21, 1897, Dr. John Shaw Billings, the library’s executive director, was determined that in his building, design would not triumph over function. He had in mind Boston’s newly built public library, a beautiful but in his opinion poorly functioning building. Billings, an ex-army physician, was responsible for organizing the Surgeon General’s Library and a celebrated medical index. He was also an expert in hospital design, and was thus familiar with building construction. He drafted a plan for the new library whose most unorthodox feature was the location of the main reading room. It was not located near the main entrance, as was common practice, but on an upper floor, above the book stacks.
The terms of the architectural competition were strict and included detailed floor plans that the competitors were required to follow. There were two stages, intended to attract new talent as well as established firms. First, six architects were chosen from an open competition. These six then advanced to a second stage, where they competed against six invited firms that included not only McKim, Mead & White (the architects of the Boston Public Library), but also such luminaries as Peabody & Stearns, George B. Post, and an up-and-coming young firm, Carrère & Hastings. The up-and-comers carried the day. McKim, much to his chagrin, not only lost but placed third behind Howard & Cauldwell. It was his own fault, since he imperiously ignored the suggested plan and substituted his own arrangement. Carrère & Hastings conscientiously followed Billings’ requirements.
The projected budget for the new library was not large ($1.7 million) and Billings expected a relatively modest building.* That was not what he got. All three designs were monumental. Carrère & Hastings and Howard & Cauldwell used the Modern French style, which was more ornate and allowed for more articulation to the façade than the austere Classical style that McKim opted for. All incorporated giant columns rising the full height of the two floors—Corinthian in McKim’s case, Ionic in the other two (the completed building is Corinthian). The compositional strategies were roughly similar: a monumental stair led to an elevated main floor; the entrance was placed in the center (more understated in McKim’s elegant design); statuary and urns adorned the attic. All three entrants shared a sense of what was beautiful and what was appropriate, and all were concerned with conveying the same message of permanence, dignity, and of culture rooted in the past.
I mentioned the New York Public Library competition when I gave a public lecture in connection with a recent architectural competition for the new Salt Lake City Public Library. The library board had conducted a national search for an architect, visited new libraries across the country, and solicited proposals from prominent architects. They had narrowed their list to four firms: Charles Gwathmey and Robert Siegel are respected New York architects with a long record of university buildings and museums, including a new library of science, industry, and business for the New York Public Library system. Moshe Safdie had built major civic buildings in Israel, Canada, and the United States, and recently completed the public library in Vancouver, British Columbia. Moore Ruble Yudell is a Los Angeles firm founded by the late Charles Moore, with whom John Ruble and Buzz Yudell built several university libraries and a public library in Berlin. Will Bruder, the least well-known of the four, is a southwesterner and the architect of the new, well-regarded Phoenix Public Library.
I told my audience that I thought that the Salt Lake City library board would have a more difficult choice than their nineteenth-century New York counterparts. It was not a question of function. The Salt Lake City librarians had prepared an equally exhaustive program of requirements, so whichever architect was chosen commodity probably would be well served. As for firmness, I was reasonably sure that any of these experienced firms would build soundly. It was the consideration of delight that would make the selection harder. Gwathmey and Siegel design crisply detailed, understated buildings in a latter-day version of the International Style. Safdie, too, is a modernist, but he follows in the footsteps of Pei, and his buildings are frankly monumental—the Vancouver library had been likened to the Roman Coliseum. Moore Ruble Yudell’s work is different. Informal and animated, their eclectic Postmodern designs are likely to include ornament and architectural motifs drawn from their surroundings. Bruder, on the other hand, designs chic buildings that incorporate exposed structural elements, rough industrial materials, and sleek details. Building on the same site, fulfilling the same functional requirements, and using the same up-to-date construction technology, the four firms would produce libraries that would look different.
The library board awarded the commission to Moshe Safdie, and a year later the plans for the new building were unveiled. The new library will feature an unusual triangular-shaped main building and a curving wall-like structure that encloses a public square. A hundred years ago, it was taken for granted that the New York Public Library would be designed in some variant of the Classical style. Today a public library can take many guises. It can be relentlessly avant-garde, like the new $1.5 billion national library in Paris, where the books are housed in four L-shaped 22-story glass towers, and the readers are lodged in underground rooms, which the London Times described as “a series of rectangular salons (identical of course) where you can admire the ultra-smooth gray concrete, steel grille ceilings and the expanses of African veneer.”1 A new library can be comfortably Modernist, like the new British Library in London, which the Independent humorously described as “a giant municipal building that has made its way from Scandinavia, having crashed headfirst through an English brickworks on the way.”2 Tom Beeby’s handsome Harold T. Washington Library in Chicago, on the other hand, is distinctly old-fashioned, with rusticated stone walls and carved brick ornaments that are a literal evocation of the city’s nineteenth-century architectural tradition. Instead of trendy plastic or metal chairs, the reading areas are equipped with solid wood tables and traditional courthouse chairs. James Ingo Freed’s Main Public Library in San Francisco, on the other hand, is both old and new: the imposing granite and stainless steel exterior is more or less Classical on one façade, and more or less Modernist on another.
The coexistence of different architectural styles is nothing new. In a 1913 essay titled “Style in American Architecture,” Ralph Adams Cram identified no less than seven contemporary styles, although he called them “tendencies.” Five were traditional: McKim’s pure Classicism; the Beaux-Arts French Modern; Colonial, which was associated with houses but was also appearing in larger buildings such as the Johns Hopkins University campus; Cram’s own High Gothic; and a looser interpretation of the medieval style as practiced by his partner Goodhue. Two were new: steel-frame construction, which Cram described as an enfant terrible; and what he called the Secessionists—Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago, the Greene brothers in Pasadena—who exhibited “a strongly developed enmity to archaeological forms of any kind.” Cram was not sanguine about the future, but he nevertheless concluded: “Chaos then confronts us, in that there is no single architectural following, but legion; and in that fact lies the honor of our art, for neither is society one, or ever at one with itself.”3
Cram is right: most historical periods are marked by stylistic confusion; it is stylistic consensus that is unusual. There was such a brief consensus in the late 1890s, when both architects and the American public, under the influence of the immensely popular World’s Columbian Exposition, embraced Classicism, at least for public buildings. That unanimity lasted long enough for the New York Public Library competition, but it began to unravel shortly after, as Cram’s essay makes clear. There was also a consensus in the 1920s, at least among progressive architects. That consensus did not last either. After 1940, Mies van der Rohe gave up the free-flowing plans and asymmetrical massing that had characterized the Barcelona Pavilion and the Tugendhat House, and began designing buildings whose details and materials were Modern but whose layout and composition were distinctly Classical. In the 1920s, Le Corbusier proclaimed the “Five Points of a New Architecture”: the building raised on stilts; the roof garden; the frame structure that allowed a free plan; the free façade; and the horizontal ribbon window. He, too, had second thoughts. Thirty years later, his wonderful chapel at Ronchamps had massive sculpted wall that concealed a concrete frame; the roof, far from being flat, resembled a billowing nun’s coif. Le Corbusier, who had coined the famous expression, “a house is a machine for living in,” now adopted distinctly un-machinelike building materials such as crudely finished concrete, exposed brick, roughened stucco, and fieldstone. This volte face gave rise to the so-called Brutalist style, which had a worldwide influence, shaping the work of architects as dissimilar as James Stirling and Paul Rudolph, and ultimately opening the door to Postmodern stylistic experiments such as Charles Moore’s little house in the Berkeley hills.
The inconstancy of the International Style practitioners should have been expected. The history of Western architecture is of architects searching for rules, only to bend and break them. Even Classicism, which appears at first glance to be highly regimented, is not immune. As far as we know, the ancient Greeks used only three orders: Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Vitruvius describes them, and also refers to a Tuscan order, which is a Roman invention. Roman, too, is the so-called Composite order, an ornate blend of Ionic and Corinthian. The vault, the arch, and the dome, unknown to the Greeks, were other Roman additions to the Classic canon. Architects have been stretching Classical rules ever since: breaking pediments, flattening pilasters, magnifying and shrinking columns, rusticating masonry. A sixteenth-century French architect, Philibert de l’Orme, invented a French order; Edwin Lutyens devised an order based on Mughal precedents for the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi; more recently, Allan Greenberg created an order for the offices of the Secretary of State that incorporated the Great Seal of the United States. Michael Graves designed Classical caryatids (columns carved in the shape of human figures) to support the pedimented front of an office building for the Walt Disney Company in Burbank. While the supports of the porch of the Erechtheon in Athens take the form of graceful maidens, Graves’ caryatids are the Seven Dwarfs.
The headquarters of a company whose logo is a pair of mouse ears obviously demands a different decorum from a temple. In the past, religious buildings and palaces required a narrow stylistic range. As architectural commissions grew to include civic and commercial buildings, warehouses, factories, shops and cinemas, houses and weekend houses—every sort of building—a single style no longer sufficed. Gothic is an evocative style for churches, but despite Walpole’s efforts it is ill-adapted to houses. Romanesque makes imposing city halls, but is too heavy to be applied to skyscrapers. The International Style makes striking small buildings but monotonous large ones. Shingle Style cottages are pleasing; a Shingle Style Home Depot is ridiculous. As Cram wisely observed, “Architecture is nothing unless it is intimately expressive, and if utterly different things clamor for voicing, different also must be their architectural manifestation.”4
The great architects—Brunelleschi, Palladio, Wren, Richardson, Lutyens—regularly looked to the past for inspiration. In 1965, Richard Meier built the Smith House, which has been called the first International Style revival building. Like all revivalists, Meier picks and chooses. At first glance, the Smith House has all the stylistic hallmarks of a Le Corbusier villa of the 1920s: a free plan, flat roof, white walls, pipe railings, horizontal ribbon windows, a ramp. Yet it is built out of wood and steel, not masonry. The white walls are painted wood siding, not stucco; the details are more refined, the plate-glass sheets are larger, the structure lighter. The result is an International Style that is filtered through American consciousness and shaped by American technology. It is like Thomas Jefferson building Classical columns out of wood—the same, but different.
Although art historians use terms like Gothic Revival and Greek Revival to distinguish later reincarnations of styles, architects look at history differently. “For the serious architect the past exists not as a legacy to be possessed through a self-conscious act of the ‘modern’ will,” writes Roger Scruton in The Aesthetics of Architecture, “but as an enduring fact, an ineliminable part of an extended present.”5 That is why architects, whether they are Inigo Jones or Louis Kahn, make architectural pilgrimages to the Mediterranean roots of Western architecture. Sketchbook in hand, they plumb the secrets of the master builders of the past. Consciousness of the past may also explain why architects tend to resist being categorized according to style; they instinctively understand that the history of architecture—including the present—is a continuity rather than a series of episodes.
Stylistic consistency is much admired today, but it was not always so. In 1419, Filippo Brunelleschi began the Foundling Hospital in Florence, whose delicate arcade of Corinthian columns surmounted by pedimented windows is generally considered the first building of the Renaissance. At the very same time, he was building a great dome over the crossing of the cathedral of Florence in a style that was not Classical but distinctly Gothic, pointed arches and all. The German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel is best known for his severe Classical public buildings such as the superb Altes Museum in Berlin, but he also worked in other styles: Gothic in churches, and picturesque Italianate in villas. McKim, Mead & White favored the Classical style for public buildings and palatial residences, but built Norman parish churches, Shingle Style summer retreats, French Renaissance mansions, and American Colonial country houses. John Russell Pope, an eclectic master, designed beautiful picturesque Tudor, Georgian, and Colonial country estates. Edwin Lutyens was another Classicist whose residential work was eclectic.
Domestic architects had to be adaptable, because house styles changed according to fashion. In the United States, Tudor was popular in the 1900s, as was the Free Style; Cotswold and French Provincial appeared in the 1920s. After the 1930s, influenced by the restoration of Williamsburg, American Colonial returned to favor. The Cotswold style, with its relatively severe details and blunt forms, created a very different setting from French Provincial, which tended to have more delicate details, from Free Style with its almost rustic atmosphere, or from sturdy Colonial. Since historic styles carry cultural overtones, using different styles was also a way for architects—and clients—to say different things.
If architectural style is a language—an analogy that is deeply flawed—it is closer to slang than to grammatical prose. Architectural styles are mutable, unregulated, improvised. Architects break the rules, and invent new ones. In part, this is simply the irrepressible urge of creative individuals. In part, architects break stylistic rules because they can. After all, most of the rules that govern building design—fire codes, building codes, zoning laws, budgets, programmatic requirements, engineering norms—are outside the architect’s control; stylistic rules are firmly within his purview. Since architecture is so intensely competitive, doing something unexpected, unusual, or just different is a way to be noticed, to rise above the crowd.
In addition to historical styles, there have also been styles associated with individual architects. The Palladian style made its way from Andrea Palladio to Inigo Jones, from him to Colen Campbell and Lord Burlington, and thence to Thomas Jefferson. It reappears in the work of contemporary Classicists such as Allan Greenberg. H. H. Richardson’s influence was considerably shorter-lived, but for at least 20 years Richardsonian Romanesque rolled over the United States like an “aesthetic Juggernaut,” in Cram’s colorful phrase. Mies van der Rohe’s steel-and-glass style likewise prevailed for more than two decades, and his characteristic I-beam window mullion can still be seen in contemporary curtain walls.
Buildings like Jones’ Palladian Queen’s House in Greenwich, Adler & Sullivan’s Richardsonian Romanesque Auditorium Building in Chicago, and Gordon Bunshaft’s Miesian Lever House are not copies but satisfying originals. However, most personal styles are not easily adaptable. A building in Wright’s unmistakable Prairie style, for example, simply looks like a knock-off. Some personal styles are simply too obsessive, which is probably why Frank Furness and the equally idiosyncratic Barcelona architect Antonio Gaudí never attracted a following.
Inigo Jones consciously based his work on the architecture of Palladio, but he did not think of himself as working in the Palladian “style,” any more than Palladio would have referred to the Classical “style.” Although Renaissance architects described their architecture as all’antica—in the antique manner—they took it for granted that the history of architecture was a progression: the Romans improved on the Greeks, and they would improved on the Romans. According to the architecture historian Peter Collins, the use of the word style to designate the architecture of a particular period or country is relatively late. He cites James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s Antiquities of Athens, published in 1762 and credited with inaugurating the Classical Revival in England. The authors, both architects, referred to “the Grecian and Roman style of building.”6
The Latin root of “style” is stilus. A stilus was the sharp-pointed tool used to write on wax tablets and, by inference, stilus also referred to the way that something was written. This sense of technique carried over to English, and the original meaning of style was those features of literary composition that belonged to the form rather than to the substance of the matter being expressed. The seventeenth-century English musical composer Samuel Wesley put it neatly: “Style is the dress of thought.” Jacques-François Blondel, who was Louis XV’s architect and who founded the first full-time school of architecture in Europe in 1750, adopted this literary meaning as a metaphor and described architectural style as a building’s character—for example, rustic, regal, or heroic. “Style in the organization of façades and in the decoration of rooms is the poetry of architecture,” he taught his students, “which alone makes all the architect’s compositions truly interesting.”7
Literary style described the way that something was written, expressed, or performed. Architectural style, in Blondel’s sense, describes the way that something was built. Although architecture is often defined in terms of abstractions such as space, light, and volume, buildings are above all physical artifacts. The experience of architecture is palpable: the grain of wood, the veined surface of marble, the cold precision of steel, the textured pattern of brick. But exactly what do we see when we look at brickwork? We see the joints between the bricks and the mortar (which can be flush, or scraped out to create shadows; the bonding patterns; the way that the bricks turn the corner; the surrounding of openings; and the connection between the brick wall and the foundation or the eaves. What we see are details.
Details are a major preoccupation of the architect. Once the overall form of a building is determined—“the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together in light”—there remains the question not only of what materials are to be used and how these will be assembled, but also of how the hundreds of parts of the building are to be designed: from the door frames and the window sills to the railings and the baseboards.
The function of a baseboard is to cover the joint between the wall and the floor, and secondarily to protect the wall from scuffing. There are dozens of ways that this can be done. Baseboards can be prominent or discreet, a complicated assembly of board, cap and base, or a simple strip of hardwood. Or nothing—many modern architects dispense with baseboards altogether. The baseboards in my living room are twelve inches tall. They are not wood but cast iron, since they are really disguised radiators. My house was built in 1908, influenced by the British Free Style of Voysey and Baillie Scott, and to further preserve a simple, rustic atmosphere the architect had the baseboards/radiators painted to resemble wood.
Railings have a simple function—they must be sturdy enough to support us if we lean on them, and they must provide a secure hand-hold: if railings are open, the spaces between the supports and the rails should be small enough to prevent children from falling through. Classical railings, developed during the Renaissance, consist of balusters supporting a handrail. Balusters—little columns—can have a single or a double swelling curve, or a vase shape. Fabricated in wood or masonry, they can be round or square in cross-section, and plain or highly ornamented. Railings can be replaced by parapets with pierced screens. These can be stone or metal: bronze, wrought, or cast iron. The screens can be simple X-shapes, intertwining geometrical patterns, or complicated floral figures as in Art Nouveau staircases. Perhaps the simplest open railings are those of the great Adirondack camps, whose builders mimicked X-shaped wrought-iron railings in unpeeled rustic tree trunks.
Modern railings are usually metal. In his early villas, Le Corbusier used white-painted pipe railings to create a nautical image; in later buildings like the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard, flat steel bars take the place of pipes. The railings in Mies van der Rohe’s buildings usually have only a single intermediate rail, located precisely halfway between the handrail and the floor; the vertical stanchions, the handrail, and the rail are made of identical square steel bars. The railings in Louis Kahn buildings tend to be parapets, but where he is obliged to use an open railing the design is as simple as possible. I have seen a short stair railing that consisted of a single bronze bar, bent at each end to form the uprights. Richard Meier uses metal railings, too, but because there are sometimes as many as six horizontal rails, the visual effect is more pronounced—they resemble staffs in sheet music.
When Brutalism was in fashion, railings were correspondingly heavy: concrete beams, wide enough to sit on but unpleasant to the touch, or massive wood balustrades, as solid as fenders on a truck dock. The vogue among many younger architects today is toward lightness and exposed construction, and railings reflect that fashion, too. The screens of the railings of Peter Rose’s Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal are industrial-looking perforated sheets of anodized aluminum, prominently bolted to the stanchions. Bernard Tschumi substitutes steel cables (complete with turnbuckles) for the intermediate horizontal rails of the ramp railings of Lerner Hall at Columbia University, another nautical reference, but to a yacht rather than a steamship. These solutions appear mannered compared to the simple railing that I. M. Pei designed for the East Building of the National Gallery. The stainless steel handrail highlights the solidity of the rose-colored Tennessee marble by appearing to float in mid-air, since it is supported by continuous sheets of tempered glass embedded in the floor.
The transparent railings of I. M. Pei’s East Building are understated, elegant, and luxurious—like the building. “Beauty will result from the form and correspondence of the whole with respect to the several parts,” taught Palladio, “of the parts with regard to each other, and of these again to the whole.”8 The successful relationship of the details to each other, and to the building is governed by the architect’s sense of style. That is why the architect of my house painted the radiators to resemble wood; a technologically inclined architect might have painted them silver; a minimalist would dispense with baseboards and hide the radiators in the wall. The role of details is not to complement architecture; details are architecture. “The aesthetic understanding [of architecture],” writes Roger Scruton, “is inseparable from a sense of detail.”9 Mies van der Rohe is supposed to have said “God is in the details.”* He did not mean that details are functionally important (although they are), or that good details prolong the life of a building (although they do). He meant that details are the soul of architecture. That is why, just as an archaeologist can reconstruct a pot from a few shards, or a paleontologist can surmise the form of a prehistoric animal from bone fragments, it is possible to divine the architect’s idea of a building by examining its details.
The house that Robert Venturi built for his mother in 1964 shook the foundations of the International Style; much of this effect was the result of details. Although Venturi obviously was working in a Modernist idiom—there is a strip window and a steel-pipe railing—he also incorporated distinctly un-Modernist features such as trim, both inside and out. Classical architects use a large variety of moldings—fillet, astragal, egg and dart, ogee—that can be combined and recombined to great decorative effect. The International Style, in its effort to do away with ornament, outlawed trim. Walls were flat planes. Windows had no frames. Joints between materials were simply hairline cracks. The conspicuous exterior dado, the baseboards, and the chair-rails in the Vanna Venturi House were hardly Classical moldings—they were merely boards with chamfered edges—yet they challenged the assumption that trim and Modernism were incompatible.
Coming through the front door of the Vanna Venturi House one immediately senses that it is an unusual place. A broad stair rises beside the fireplace, then peters out to almost nothing. The fireplace looks like an abstract sculpture, but it has a traditional mantelpiece. A free-standing column à la Corbusier stands beside a chair-rail. Then there is the furniture. Ever since the Tugendhat House—for which Mies had designed the furniture—it was taken for granted that modern houses required modern furniture. Venturi has explained that “I designed the house so my mother’s old furniture (c. 1925, plus some antiques) would look good in it.”10 Instead of the iconic bent-tube Breuer chairs, there are homely ladderback chairs around the dining table; instead of an Eames lounge chair and ottoman, a comfortable stuffed sofa. It is a contradictory atmosphere—the International Style willfully distorted through the lens of traditional bourgeois domesticity.
Whether one is looking up at the tall dome of the Pantheon, descending the spiraling vortex of Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, or standing in the living room of Venturi’s small house, the experience of architecture is above all the experience of being in a separate, distinct world. That is what distinguishes architecture from sculpture—it is not an object but a place. The sense of being in a special place that is a three-dimensional expression of the architect’s imagination is one of the distinctive pleasures of architecture. To create a strong sense of place, the surroundings must be all of a piece; space, mass, shapes, and materials must reflect the same sensibility. That is why details are so important. A jarring detail or an inconsistency—something “out of place”—and the fantasy begins to crumble. Yes, fantasy. Illusion has been a part of architecture ever since the ancient Greeks made columns with a gently swelling taper to deceive the eye. This is not to say that architecture is stage décor. When the wind blows, the canvas scenery blows over; the building resists the elements. Architecture surrounds and shelters us. It is the real world but it is also a vision.
•••
The Postmodern movement that followed the Vanna Venturi House was relatively short-lived but it had an important consequence: it broke the stranglehold of Modernism, leaving designers free to explore other forms of expression. The profusion of styles that ensued is demonstrated by the work of three gifted but vastly different architects, Allan Greenberg, Hugh Newell Jacobsen, and Enrique Norten.
Allan Greenberg is a confirmed Classicist. He does not consider this an anomaly. “To be truly modern,” he writes, “means finding the dynamic balance between eternal human values and the specific demands of the present. Classical architecture provides the means to achieve this balance because it is the most comprehensive architectural language that human beings have yet developed.”11 Although Greenberg looks to the past, his is not the attitude of an archeologist. Like Carrère & Hastings, and generations of architects before them, Greenberg approaches Classicism as a tradition to be studied, absorbed—then extended.
Early in his career, after emigrating to the United States from South Africa, Greenberg was employed writing design standards for courthouses, which led to an unusual commission: the conversion of an empty supermarket into a courthouse. He gave the commercial building in Manchester, Connecticut, a new façade dominated by a large arch, over-scaled voussoirs, and a pediment. Inside, the barrel-vaulted ceiling of the lobby was supported by a Tuscan order. Greenberg had graduated from Yale in 1965, and like many of his contemporaries was experimenting with the new freedom offered by Postmodernism. However, unlike Venturi and Moore, Greenberg was not coyly introducing Classical elements into a Modernist building; he was returning to Classical roots. From this modest beginning, over the next two decades, came a variety of commissions: a suite of rooms for the Secretary of State in the United States Department of State building, several college and university buildings, and a Roman Catholic church. His commercial work included a newspaper office building in Athens, Georgia, a new entrance for Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and a flagship store for Tommy Hilfiger in Beverly Hills. Greenberg is also known for large country houses, both in the United States and in Europe. Like Lutyens and John Russell Pope, he ventures stylistically farther afield in his residential work—using Georgian and American Colonial styles. One of his early houses was inspired by Mount Vernon, another by Palladio’s unfinished Villa Thiene. Several are picturesque rambling affairs whose relaxed informality recalls the best work of McKim, Mead & White.
One of my favorite Greenberg houses is a cottage set among windblown dunes on the eastern seaboard. Completed in 1992, the low-lying building is shingled, but it is not exactly Shingle Style. Recent Shingle Style buildings are often broken down into many small parts, giving them a fussy and nervous appearance. Such seaside cottages look as if a good wind could blow them away. Greenberg’s aim here is to make a heavyweight building of great solidity that is rooted firmly in the dune scrub. The one-story Atlantic façade is almost perfectly symmetrical: a large arched window flanked by two semi-circular bays, rotund sentinels standing against the ocean winds. The two-story landward side is more informal, ringed by a sheltered porch. Massivity informs the details: sturdy Tuscan columns, a heavy cornice at the eaves of the large roof, rugged window frames. The sense of robustness is accentuated by occasional delicacy: the arched window incorporates scrolled brackets that support an elegant reverse ogee molding at the eaves. Inside, the fireplace has a brick hearth, a slate lintel, and a wood surround, whose almost modern simplicity is softened by a cavetto molding beneath the mantelpiece. The ceiling is supported by exposed trusses of rough, reused timbers. Although most people would describe this house as “traditional,” this is not an exercise in a particular historical style. There is a nod here to the British Arts and Crafts architect  C. F. A. Voysey, and it is obvious that Greenberg has looked at Lutyens’ country houses. But this is a modern house, although designed by an architect with a Classical sensibility. It admirably fulfills Palladio’s call for a correspondence of the whole with the parts and the parts with the whole.
Hugh Newell Jacobsen studied at Yale under Louis Kahn, worked for Philip Johnson, and opened his own office in 1958. He established himself as a premier residential architect, winning commissions in the United States and abroad and receiving numerous design awards. Several of the awards were for restoration of historic buildings, notably the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Hôtel Talleyrand in Paris. A Modernist by training and inclination, Jacobsen was, nevertheless, affected by the winds of change unleashed by Venturi’s little house. Starting in 1980, he evolved a hybrid style in which American regional forms and materials are combined with International Style precision, spareness, and simplicity. A house on Nantucket in shingles and white trim looks vernacular until one notices the careful proportions and refined, elegant details such as tall French doors in the living room that slide into wall pockets that also conceal shutters and screen doors. A post-and-beam Caribbean guest house with broad overhangs has the ingenuous simplicity of a beach shack. The Palladian plan and temple-like pavilions of an Ohio residence pay homage to the local Greek Revival. An Ohio country house recalls a board-and-batten Gothic Revival farmhouse. “I endeavor to design buildings that express a sense of belonging,” Jacobsen says, “buildings that reflect or abstract the nearby architecture and the traditions dictated by the climate and local materials.”12
The Palmedo House, built in 1988, reinterprets the American Colonial architecture of its location—Long Island. At first glance, the six pavilions resemble a little village, a little Amish village, judging from the austere white wood siding, the prim details, and the identical pitched roofs. Each pavilion is a perfect little “house” with identical square and vertical multi-paned windows (that open by sliding into cunning wall pockets). This sounds precious, but Jacobsen is not a romantic. The central “house” contains the living room, a three-story space open to the roof. Although the multi-paned windows are present at an upper level of the wall, the corner of the room is glazed with large, mullionless sheets of plate glass, offering dramatic views of Long Island Sound. This is an International Style device, as is the economy of detail and the clean, cool, atmosphere of the interior. On the other hand, the fireplace, which in an orthodox International Style house would be painted brick or bush-hammered concrete, is decorously built into the wall, which gives the room a traditional, civilized air. The chief idea here is to highlight the tension between old and new, between the traditional clapboarded architecture and the demands of modern life. Whereas Greenberg seamlessly resolves this tension, Jacobsen allows it to surface. If this sounds like textbook Postmodernism, it is not. Jacobsen artlessly combines new and old without the slightest hint of irony.
Jacobsen reacts to the collapse of Modernism by seeking a compromise position, while Greenberg anchors himself in the certainties of Classicism. Enrique Norten, the youngest of the three, takes a different course—he is trying to put Modernism back together again. Norten, who studied at Cornell, established his office in his native Mexico City in 1985. In a relatively short time he produced an impressive body of work that includes institutional, commercial, and residential buildings. His major projects are a services building for the media giant TELEVISA and the National School of Theater. Both incorporate bulging, metal shell-roofs that recall the 1950s buildings of the French architect-engineer Jean Prouvé. Prouvé was intent on applying new methods of construction, particularly industrialization and prefabrication. His buildings, extremely light and assembled from standardized elements, were real “machines for living.” Norten, too, is preoccupied with industrial building technologies, the lighter the better. Double-tensed glass curtain walls are mysteriously supported by a steel-frame. Roofs hang by steel cables from steel masts. Slender, canted columns brace a glass-roofed portico. Railings, in a Norten design, are almost always opportunities for structural legerdemain: suspended sheets of glass, stretched steel cables, perforated metal screens.
In 1994, Norten built a house for himself and his family on a tight urban site in Mexico City. The three-story street façade is mostly a blank concrete wall; the wall facing the interior walled patio is entirely glass. The main living floor is open, except for the kitchen; the upper bedroom floor is shaded and given privacy by a redwood, louvered screen. A functionalist style pervades the house. The clinical cabinetwork is white-painted wood. A concrete wall in the dining room is bare save for the regular pattern of the formwork ties and the pour lines marks. The windows are large sections of plate glass in simple aluminum frames; a 10-foot section slides aside to entirely open the dining room to the patio. The sliding wall recalls the disappearing windows in Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat House, but the resemblance ends here. Mies’ spare interior is opulent and assertive; Norten’s is austere, almost monastic: a neutral background for family life. This is an unsentimental idea of the home. Not exactly a “machine for living,” but certainly machinelike in its precision and rational layout.
Like Greenberg and Jacobsen, Norten reflects on the past. Although his house has little to do formally with the International Style of the flat-roofed stucco villas of the 1920s—except for the white-painted circular steel columns—it shares that period’s ambitions; it is highly abstract, idealistic, technophile, and lacking in applied ornament. Decoration results not from trim, but from the surface quality of the different materials—concrete, red oak flooring, etched glass—and from the relentless articulation of structural connections. Norten’s buildings exhibit another feature of the International Style: they are placeless. That is, while they carefully respond to the specifics of the program and the site, they do not explicitly acknowledge their immediate regional context. Whether they are in Mexico or New Mexico—where Norten is building a heritage center—the style is the same: understated, coolly competent, cosmopolitan.
Whether one prefers the work of Greenberg, Jacobsen, or Norten is a matter of taste (I happen to like all three). The buildings are different, yet the three architects have something in common. They are serious about what they are doing, that is, their buildings exhibit a strong sense of conviction. They pay enormous attention to details. They are disciplined, but they understand their self-imposed rules well enough to occasionally break them. Moreover, while their architecture is built with a great sense of style, it is never merely stylized. That is because in their buildings, style—the manner of expression—is always in the service of content—that which is being expressed. Style without content quickly degenerates into caricature, like a speaker who makes grand gestures and rhetorical flourishes, but has nothing to say. The buildings of Greenberg, Jacobsen, and Norten, on the contrary, have a great deal to tell us about our past, our surroundings, and ourselves.
Greenberg, Jacobsen, and Norten do not describe what they do in terms of style. I think that there are a number of reasons that architects are uncomfortable talking about the subject. A suspicion of style is a heritage of the Modern Movement, which preached against the arbitrary dictates of style and fashion, while maintaining an unspoken but rigid stylistic consistency. So deep-rooted is this teaching that it remains a moral stricture on most architects, whether or not they are Modernists. Perhaps another reason for the reluctance to discuss style is fear. Fear that being linked to a particular style is to be put in a box—like most creative people, architects dislike being categorized. Also fear that talking about style will make architecture—a serious business—sound frivolous. Better to leave that to interior decorators and fashion designers, professions that architects regard with a mixture of disdain and envy. Finally, there is an unspoken fear of style because it is subject to the whims and the fancies of fashion. That fear, at least, seems to me to be ill-founded. An architecture that recognizes style—and fashion—would not be an architecture that is introspective and self-referential, as are so many contemporary buildings. It would be part of the world—not architecture for architects, but architecture for the rest of us. And that would not be a bad thing.

Coda
Richard Morris Hunt was the most celebrated American architect of the late nineteenth century. His preeminence is reflected by his appointment as the architect of two important national works: the centerpiece building of the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, and the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. He was feted at home and abroad. Hunt was the first architect to receive an honorary doctorate from Harvard and the first American to receive a Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects, and he was made an honorary member of the French Académie and a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. A hundred years later, his counterpart is Frank O. Gehry. Since being awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1989, Gehry has gone on to win more honors than any other living architect, including such major arts awards as the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (a non-architectural award of which he is the first recipient) and the Japanese Praemium Imperiale, the Nobel of the art world. Even the staid American Institute of Architects, which had previously shunned Gehry in lieu of more mainstream practitioners, awarded him its top accolade, the AIA Gold Medal.
No pair of architects could be more dissimilar than this distinctly odd couple, the proper High Society favorite of the Gilded Age and the untidy bohemian from Santa Monica. Yet they bear comparison. They were both late bloomers. Gehry was 48 when he gained national recognition. Until then, he had been running his own office in Los Angeles for almost twenty years, building shopping centers, suburban offices, department stores, and apartments in competent but unremarkable renditions of L.A. modern. The project that brought him to national attention was his own remodeled house: a nondescript bungalow encased in an unsettling Cubist composition of unpainted plywood, corrugated metal, and chain-link fencing. The odd shapes and unorthodox materials marked Gehry as a maverick. That was in 1978. Unexpectedly, he attracted a broad range of commissions, not only residential clients, but also museums, public institutions, universities, corporations, and developers, and not only in the United States but around the world.
Hunt was 43 when he came into his own. He had established an architectural practice in New York in 1855, almost immediately on his return from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He was moderately successful, achieving local renown for the Tribune Building, an early New York skyscraper. Despite his Parisian background, Hunt worked in the prevalent Ruskinian Gothic style. Of his Presbyterian Hospital in downtown Manhattan, the architectural critic Montgomery Schuyler wrote: “The building is of Gothic design with very red brick, and very irregular stone dressings, which, it must be confessed regretfully, are not pleasing to the eye.”3 For his next project, the Lenox Library, Hunt tried something different. He borrowed from the French Neo-Grec style, popularized by Labrouste in the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève, adding Renaissance details and his own characteristically vigorous surface modeling. The result was a startling departure from convention, a monochrome limestone block of imposing dignity. The Lenox Library (which stood on Fifth Avenue on the site of the present-day Frick Collection) marked a shift in architectural taste, away from Ruskin to a grand and frankly aesthetic Classicism. The 1880s was a decade of great prosperity, and newly wealthy New Yorkers eagerly sought out Hunt’s architectural blend of good taste and ostentatious display. He obliged them in a string of high-profile commissions: magnificent mansions along Fifth Avenue, country houses on Long Island, and palatial “cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island. Hunt died in 1895, but in the last seven years of his life, he completed more than fifty projects.
Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina, is a good example of his stylistic prowess. Hunt modeled the design of this 250-room residence on the Château de Blois, whose style is not the severe Classicism of the Italian Renaissance favored by architects such as Charles McKim, but the more ornate and picturesque French Renaissance. To a modern visitor, the spires, turrets, and steep slate roofs of Biltmore recall Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle, which is not surprising since Disney also used a Loire Valley chateau—the Château d’Ussé—as his model. But the comparison does Hunt an injustice, for his design is neither prettified nor quaint. His client, George W. Vanderbilt, was a young bachelor (he married soon after the house was finished), and for him Hunt created an architecture that is robust, masculine, and immensely self-assured, not in the least like a fairytale.
Vanderbilt was drawn to French chateaux, which Hunt showed him during a whirlwind European tour, since young George and his wealthy family imagined themselves American aristocrats. There are coats of arms bearing Vs all over the house. Hunt provides his client with an imagined regal setting, but deals with the past in his own peculiar way. Although he modeled the building on Blois, he makes no attempt to create a replica of the sixteenth-century chateau, but draws details from other buildings of the period and recombines them into an original whole. Nor does he try to create the illusion that this is a sixteenth-century building—there is no artificial weathering, no aging effect no simulated historicism. The interior is modern, bright, and open. The focus of the main floor is a glass-roofed conservatory, a common nineteenth-century feature. The stonework of the house is impeccable, much crisper and more sharply defined than at Blois. Hunt was no antiquarian, and modern American technology abounds. The floors of fireproof hollow tile are supported by steel I-beams and the steep slate roofs by steel roof trusses. Cast iron replaces wrought iron and high-quality bricks, fired in the estate brickworks, back-up the limestone walls. Equally novel are the elevators and telephones, electrical lighting, hot and cold running water, and forced air central heating. There is no doubt that for Hunt, Biltmore is an up-to-the-minute modern building. That is part of its style, too.
Like Hunt, Frank Gehry enlists novel materials in his buildings. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, for example, is clad in titanium, previously used chiefly for building aircraft. The metallic walls curve, twist, and turn. One part of the building slides under an adjoining bridge; another emerges from a reflecting pool. Bilbainos refer to the museum as the “artichoke,” which comes close to describing it, if you can imagine a gleaming, metallic artichoke more than two hundred feet high. The seeming disorder—a chaotic collision of forms—has no architectural precedent. This is not sculptural architecture, it is walk-in sculpture.
“The plan is the generator” preached Le Corbusier, but with Gehry, the plan is the result. He appears to design from the outside in. The building as a composition comes first, the interior spaces follow. This implies that he shoehorns functions into the building, which is not the case. The Guggenheim has three distinct types of gallery spaces: traditional, skylit rooms for displaying its permanent collection of early Modernist art; a long boat-like space for temporary installations; and 11 smaller galleries, each with its own character, each dedicated to the works of a selected living artist. The artichoke accommodates them all. The building may appear offhanded, but there is nothing haphazard about the way it is organized.
Gehry’s talent is his exceptional formal imagination; his skill as an architect is to reconcile the forms he imagines with the functional demands of his client. And, of course, to find ways to build those forms. This is generally done without fuss. The titanium sheets simply follow the churning surfaces like shingles on a Shingle Style roof; limestone is used in a similarly unaffected fashion, without articulated joints. Gehry shares a minimalist approach to details with the early architects of the International Style, but he deploys these details to different ends. By removing familiar elements such as coping strips, fascias, and trim, he accentuates the sculptural quality of his buildings. There are no roofs or walls or windows in the Guggenheim, there are only swirling and twisting planes of metal, stone, and glass. An architecture critic once described Gehry as “a smart man from Hollywood,” which nicely captures the architect’s blend of exuberant showmanship and canny behind-the-scenes savvy.
Although sophisticated building techniques and innovative materials play a major role in Gehry’s buildings, like Hunt, he keeps technology off center stage. In that regard, he repudiates the mannered industrial style that pervades the work of many contemporary architects. Neither is he nostalgic about the past. Gehry rejects both the moralistic functionalism of the International Style and the traditions of Classicism. Architects have broken rules in the past, but rarely this unequivocally and totally.
Gehry, like Hunt, has changed the course of architecture. That is, he has made us look at our surroundings in a different way. The world of Gehry’s buildings is, at first glance, an odd place. The line between order and disorder is a thin one, and it is difficult to know what is intended and what is accidental. But his colliding forms and agitated architecture are curiously unthreatening. This is the way we live today, Gehry seems to be saying, why not enjoy it?




