Here are some wonderful sections from Paul Goldberger’s Why Architecture Matters
On Tradition vs, the New
The new is often hard to accept; it can seem ugly or coarse. It is only seldom seen as beautiful. “I do not think of art as Consolation. I think of it as Creation. I think of it as an energetic space that begets energetic space,” wrote Jeanette Winterson, who in another context observed, “The most conservative and least interested person will probably tell you that he or she likes Constable. But would our stalwart have liked Constable in 1824 when he exhibited at the Paris Salon and caused a riot? . . . To the average eye, now, Constable is a pretty landscape painter, not a revolutionary who daubed bright color against bright color ungraded by chiaroscuro. We have had 150 years to get used to the man who turned his back on the studio picture, took his easel outdoors and painted in the rapture of light. It is easy to copy Constable. It was not easy to be Constable.”
Paul Goldberger’s Why Architecture Matters
Yale’s Architecture
Friends of my parents, gave me a pair of gifts that would deepen my interest still further: a subscription to Progressive Architecture magazine and a monograph on the work of Eero Saarinen, who had died a year or so before. The first issue of the magazine that came had on its cover the Art and Architecture Building at Yale, by Paul Rudolph, which had just opened. the latest addition to the remarkable series of modern buildings Yale had commissioned over the past decade. The Saarinen book showed his designs for the Yale hockey rink and new dormitories I decided pretty much then, at age thirteen, that I was going to Yale because I liked its buildings.
I eventually came up with some more reasonable, if less inventive, reasons for going to Yale, and I arrived in New Haven in the odd circumstance of having a lot of its famous new architecture firmly in my mind. I liked it just fine, but what really swept me away was not the new architecture I had seen in books but the part of the campus that modern architectural historians and critics had most disdained, the imitation Gothic and Georgian buildings of the first four decades of the century. Once again, the world was teaching lessons, but at Yale they reached me more directly than those I had learned in New York: I was entranced by the work of James Gamble Rogers, the architect who designed most of Yale’s Gothic and Georgian architecture of the 1920s and 1930s. Rogers’s determinedly nonideological stance, his avoidance of theory in favor of what can only be called intuitive design, was liberating. lt was all right for architecture to be about feeling good, I suddenly realized; stage sets were not immoral. It was the perfect epiphany for a twenty-year-old who was just beginning to learn about empirical experience and only starting to trust his eye.
The architecture I came to admire at Yale arose from a strange combination of innocence and cynicism: a calculated, knowing, astonishingly skillful manipulation of historical elements for romantic effect. It was born of love for an institution and a belief that that love could best be expressed, and the institution’s future best assured, by replicating the style of the architecture of great institutions and great places of the past, all the better to connect with what was so admired. Was this hopelessly naive or devilishly calculating? It seems, as I look back, to have been some of both. What confidence Yale had once had in architecture, to believe in its ability to connect to the past, even to inspire transcendence. What certainty that people would accept the idea of architecture as a kind of seance, as if it could lift them out of their current place and time and drop them into another one. And yet of course it was never so simple as that-the most striking thing of all about the Yale buildings is the extent to which they were intended not as an escape from the present but an enrichment of it. Rogers and Yale were not trying to deny the present; they were deeply proud of the modern technology they used to build these buildings and of the modernity of the university that these buildings served.
In the age of modernism’s great ascendancy the Yale buildings had seemed merely simpleminded and pointless. To people who believed themselves to have serious architectural taste they were an embarrassment more than a source of pride. Yet they were clearly better than that, and I worked to learn why. They were remarkably well crafted and showed nearly flawless knowledge of proportion, scale, and texture. And they emerged from a certainty about what an institution wanted itself to be, all qualities that raised them considerably over most of the modernist buildings that followed them. A coherent idea, even a somewhat silly one, can lend tremendous power to the making of a place. And the reality of the Yale buildings, I discovered, was a great deal less silly than a lot of the thinking behind them. This is the truly important lesson I learned here: that form and scale and proportion and texture say far more about the success or failure of buildings than the stylistic associations we apply to them. Mass, scale, proportion, and texture, not to mention a building’s relation to its surrounding context, the materials with which it is built, and the way it is used, all mean much more than style.
Vincent Scully has said that we perceive architecture in two ways-associatively and empathetically or, in other words, intellectually and emotionally. We make intellectual associations between buildings and other buildings, and we feel buildings as emotional presences. Most buildings affect us both ways, and certainly all great buildings must function in both of these cate-gories, reminding us of other structures and their forms while also evoking certain deeper feelings. Superficially the makers of Yale’s Gothic buildings-and of so many other historicist buildings elsewhere in America, classical, colonial, Tudor, Spanish, Mediterranean, and what-have-you- thought of their buildings asociatively, for they were clearly reminiscent of other architecture. But for me the great discovery was that they really worked less empathetically, for their real ability is to make us feel pleasure and comfort in their presence.
Paul Goldberger’s Why Architecture Matters