Blair Kamin, Cheerleader
- 12.17.2007 - 8:36 AMCORRECTION: Michael J. Lewis, in this post, substantially understates the extent of John Silber’s errors and the breadth of the praise Millennium Park received in the national press, as well as misstating Blair Kamin’s position on Silber.
It did not take long for the bouncers at the flashy and exclusive nightclub that is contemporary architecture to show John Silber the door. Silber, the former president of Boston University, has just published Architecture of the Absurd: How ‘Genius’ Disfigured a Practical Art, a heartfelt essay about the state of architecture today, and the visual mayhem wreaked by the cult of the celebrity architect. Already the first snide response has come in and—predictably—it does not so much engage the book’s ideas as condemn the author’s temerity in writing about architecture in the first place.
The review of Blair Kamin, the architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, is remarkable for its quality of vitriol. For him, Architecture of the Absurd is “just another rant in the culture wars,” written by someone who “isn’t an architect” and who has not even inspected the buildings he reviles, merely “bloviating from afar.” Nor does Silber’s criticism offer anything new: “architecture critics have said it all before.” In the end, Architecture of the Absurd is written off as “more rant than reason.”
Such is the magisterial disdain reserved for outsiders from whom one expects no retribution and whom one can attack with impunity. But is it true that outsiders—those who bloviate from afar—have nothing to offer? What about those who bloviate from within—like, for example, Kamin?
Kamin makes much of a factual error by Silber concerning Chicago’s Millennium Park (Frank Gehry was not its planner, as Silber stated, although he designed its Pritzker Pavilion). Having found this slip, Kamin acts as if one need pay no attention to anything else that Silber says. In fact, Silber looked at Chicago’s new park, with its thicket of eye-catching public sculptures, critically, something that Kamin himself never did. Throughout the long history of that controversial project, Kamin was a dependable cheerleader, praising the park as “a real public space, not a gated fantasyland.”
It’s something of an occupational hazard for critics at municipal newspapers to be civic boosters. But Kamin’s embrace of local pieties blinded him to one of the most intriguing (and disturbing) developments in contemporary architecture. One of the reasons that Millennium Park was built so swiftly was that its planners divided it into a series of discrete features, giving donors the right to choose their own architects and sculptors. Instead of providing a comprehensive aesthetic vision, in effect the park presented, as I wrote at the time, “a series of detached vignettes—in effect, naming opportunities.” The results may indeed be extraordinarily popular, but their broader ramifications are ominous, especially once other cities relinquish aesthetic control to their fund-raising operations.
So long as there are architecture critics like Kamin, who cannot separate aesthetic judgment from civic boosterism, we have all the more need for the fresh outside perspective of an audacious and delightfully independent critic like Silber.
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December 28th, 2007 at 4:38 PM
Los Angeles Times
December 23, 2007 Sunday
Home Edition
The big buildup;
Architecture of the Absurd How “Genius” Disfigured a Practical Art; John Silber; Quantuck Lane Press: 98 pp., $27.50
BYLINE: Mark Lamster, Mark Lamster is writing a book about the political career of Peter Paul Rubens.
SECTION: BOOK REVIEW; Features Desk; Part R; Part R; Pg. 2
LENGTH: 936 words
BACK in 1981, Tom Wolfe published the archetypal work of reactionary architectural criticism, “From Bauhaus to Our House,” a happy-go-lucky evisceration of modern design and the men who brought it to America. Wolfe’s short romp through history struck a nerve, but one close to the funny bone. Reviewing it in the Nation, critic Michael Sorkin quipped, “What Tom Wolfe doesn’t know about modern architecture could fill a book. And so, indeed, it has, albeit a slim one.”
Now John Silber, former president of Boston University and failed Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate, has set himself the dubious task of assuming Wolfe’s cranky mantle. It’s a game effort: What Silber doesn’t know about modern architecture has also filled a book, although one 46 pages slimmer than Wolfe’s and absent the master’s wit. Indeed, “Architecture of the Absurd: How ‘Genius’ Disfigured a Practical Art” is so riddled with red herrings, half-truths and gratuitously provocative exaggerations that Colin Powell might try reading it at the United Nations.
Its central conceit is that a few shamelessly self-aggrandizing architects, most prominently Daniel Libeskind and Frank Gehry, have hijacked an otherwise pragmatic field and, out of naked self-interest, have fostered an “absurd” school of design that fails the functional, aesthetic and economic needs of those it is meant to serve. In his telling, the “Genius” architect is a kind of Svengali, manipulating clients with arcane “Theoryspeak” and grand visions until they “forfeit their dignity as persons and allow themselves, through vanity, gullibility, or timidity, to be seduced.” And so we have Libeskind repeatedly orchestrating a “barrage of intimidation” in order to transform his evil plans into glass and steel, and Gehry, with his “contempt for the interests of clients.”
Whatever distaste one might have for their architecture, these characterizations are misleading. Libeskind as intimidator? The man is about 5 feet tall, wears funny glasses and, in general, makes Woody Allen look like Dick Cheney. And Gehry — never mind a recent lawsuit over his design for the Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (the building is pictured on the book jacket) — has had no shortage of customers, many of them experienced developers who obviously feel he has their interests at heart.
The truth is that Libeskind, Gehry and architecture’s other so-called geniuses are giving their educated consumers precisely what they want — elaborate works of design that command the public’s attention. It’s telling that Silber fails to grapple with Gehry’s 1997 Guggenheim outpost in Bilbao, the project that launched the current signature-museum phenomenon. That building doesn’t quite fit into his narrative, and not just because it has proved a popular and critical success. This was not a design foisted on some naive client; it was the product of a partnership between Gehry and Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim director who latched onto the idea that visionary architecture could be a means of brand extension.
That view may not be appealing, but it is today’s reality. Architecture is the lipstick on the pig of development; its practitioners are far more likely to be pawns of their clients than Svengalis controlling them. In lieu of a serious discussion of this situation, Silber arrogates to architects powers they largely lack, if only because this makes it easier to point a scolding finger at them.
Silber falls into the same intellectual trap as Wolfe, who found the architect a convenient villain for the debasement of the built environment. All those bland, modern boxes littering our byways? Blame the architect, even though those boxes were not just a reflection of our corporate culture but also what its custodians demanded. So it goes with Silber, but now the works of genius under assault aren’t bland boxes but kandy-kolored streamline babies.
How did we get here? “[B]urgeoning wealth and consequent materialism support an instant culture of insatiability, which in turn demands novelty,” writes Silber. It’s a compelling insight, but he doesn’t begin to explore it. (Though he does note, apropos of nothing, that the rise of “absurdism” has “accompanied a decline in standards of taste in popular music and movies and the prevalence of tattoos and body-piercing ornamentation.”)
That Silber sees the architect as inordinately powerful is not surprising. His father, the book’s dedicatee, had an architectural practice in Texas, for which Silber fils occasionally worked. Ever since, it seems, he has engaged in a kind of Oedipal drama, brazenly attacking the profession’s authority figures. He recalls an incident at a dinner in 1952 when, “much to the consternation” of his father, he attempted a battle of wits with Frank Lloyd Wright: “Wright was not impressed and quickly dismissed my impertinence.” Years later, we find Silber, now a professor at Yale, pestering Louis I. Kahn for not putting Plexiglas switch plates in the university’s art gallery. “There was no response.” Go figure.
Predictably, Silber is the hero of his story, a one-man bulwark against architectural folly. At Boston University, he claims to have overseen more than 13 million square feet of construction. Nearly all of it lacks intellectual ambition, and no wonder. Under his regime, architects were kept in line: “I dismissed their elaborate, high-flown aesthetic justifications of design features as gratuitous bloviation.” He would know about bloviation. In a book devoted to architectural indulgence, Silber sets a standard for arrogance far exceeding that of his subjects
December 28th, 2007 at 4:42 PM
Building Design
November 30, 2007
Twisted view
SECTION: Pg. 23
LENGTH: 526 words
If gullible clients are being ripped off, this disappointing book fails to explain why, says Catherine Croft
BOOK
ARCHITECTURE OF THE ABSURD
John Silber
Norton, PB, 98pp, £ 16.99
Reading Architecture of the Absurd: How “Genius” Disfigured a Practical Art at a single sitting is like being trapped at a particularly excruciating after-dinner speech, with the same pompousness, ingratiating humour and aura of self congratulation.
The subject is provocative. As the blurb has it, author John Silber dares to “peek behind the curtain of `genius’ architects and expose their willful disdain for their clients, their budgets and the people who live or work in their creations”. He hates architects who see themselves as fine artists first and foremost and, as he sees it, fail to deliver practical, well built and cost-conscious buildings. As a professor of philosophy and law, he is perhaps, as he himself suggests, not an obvious person to be writing on architecture. But what makes his book potentially worth taking seriously is that as a former president of Boston University, he oversaw a large new-build and renovation programme, and wants others to learn from his experience.
Key failures
So why, according to Silber, is architecture today in such a state - unless, as he suggests, you stick to sensible practices who know the value of money and don’t mess around? For him, absurd architecture fails “to meet the needs - functional, aesthetic, and economic -of the client”. IM Pei’s Louvre pyramid or Phillip Johnson’s AT&T building (with the Chippendale top) both qualify, but it all seems more than a bit subjective.
When it comes to contemporary architecture, his chief culprits are Frank Gehry, Steven Holl and Daniel Libeskind. “When Gehry is hired,” he writes, “the partnership of architect and client is virtual except when it comes to paying the bill”, while Libeskind is an “eloquent, bullying architect” who excels at “metaphysical spin-doctoring of senseless contrivances”.
Silber complains about the “debasement, inexperience and supine gullibility of the clients”, whereas he could save Boston University lots of money - for instance, by achieving a 40% increase in space - by telling the architect of the School of Management to scrap the idea of a full-height atrium and opt instead for “an apparent skylight” at sixth floor level, with offices over it. This sounds a dire result, but nevertheless the point is a good one. What we need, in fact, are well informed clients who combine appropriate respect for architects’ professional skills with good judgment about when to challenge them - a tricky balance.
In some ways, it is a pity the book is so hard to warm to or agree with. Silber picks as his “piece de resistance of absurdity in architecture” Gehry’s Stata Center for MIT which, as BD has reported (November 9), is the subject of a lawsuit claiming design and construction failures. No doubt there are buildings which have gone spectacularly wrong in recent years, but this book lacks the objectivity and emotional intelligence that needs to be brought to bear on finding ways of minimising such problems in future, without stifling creativity.