 Silber excoriates Frank Gehry’s droopy metal hoods as egomaniacal gestures that “prostrate all visitors,” and attributes their popularity to gullible institutional clients spending donors’ money.
 As head of Boston University from 1971 to 2003, Silber attempted to undo damage done to the campus by Josep Lluís Sert’s bleak 1960s concrete buildings. |
book reviewThe Schlock of the New
Architecture of the Absurd: How "Genius" Disfigured By Eve M Kahn While applying to college in the late 1970s, I was often told that Boston University’s initials stand for “Big” and “Ugly.” The campus’ concrete and brick towers around treeless plazas broil in summer, and they don’t much fend off New England winter winds along the Charles River either. So the university’s 81-year-old former head, John Silber (he served as either president or chancellor at B.U. from 1971 to 2003), makes a well-informed source of complaints about Modernism. He also knows his subject because his father, Paul George Silber (1881-1957), was an architect. Paul Silber, a Jew from Berlin, emigrated to the U.S. in 1902 to work on a German pavilion modeled after Charlottenburg for the St. Louis World’s Fair. Paul married an American schoolteacher, Jewell Joslin, and settled in a Texas town named, oddly enough, Palestine. The couple raised their family (without revealing Paul’s Jewish heritage until after his death) in San Antonio. John Silber helped out at his father’s modest practice – measuring existing buildings, drafting plans and elevations – before training as a philosophy professor and university administrator. At B.U., he drew on his architectural experiences while commissioning exactly 13,729,143 sq.ft. of new construction. He mainly hired inoffensively Modernist, low-key, multi-office firms (including The Stubbins Associates and Cannon Design). During meetings, he recalls, “Some architects were initially bothered by my ability to read plans and specifications, and were occasionally put off when I dismissed their elaborate, high-flown aesthetic justifications of design features as gratuitous bloviation.[…]I have never been impressed by architects who think they are fine artists first and builders only second.” Silber is in fact renowned – not only around Massachusetts but also nationwide, since he ran for governor in 1990 – for his bluntly expressed resistance to nonsense. “Crusader on the Charles,” the New York Times dubbed him, since he’d jump into battle with entrenched B.U. faculty and tirade against hedonism and relativism. So I had high hopes for this book, his latest form of target practice – aimed at architects. The text grew out of a speech he gave to a Texas Society of Architects convention in 2003. It opens promisingly with reminiscences of 1950s academic culture he encountered at the University of Texas. He would argue amicably with colleagues there, including the renowned architectural theorists Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, about whether architecture could ever become as impractical and useless as, say, conceptual art or Dadaist poetry. Slutzky proposed that Gaudí’s undulations and spirals, for instance, qualify as absurd, but Silber countered that all Gaudí’s works are actually “functional, harmonious, and offer no offense to their neighbors.” Moreover, Silber predicted then, architecture would never sink to contemporary sculpture or music’s depths of elitist incomprehensibility. “No client of sound mind would pay for the design and construction of an absurdity[…]No architect would consider an absurd building as the fulfillment of his professional responsibilities,” he believed at the time. But he now wonders, he writes, “How could I have been so wrong?” For most of the rest of this volume he reels off savage, amusing critiques of putatively heroic recent buildings. He especially detests Le Corbusier’s urban renewal plans (“cruelly absurd, abusive, and debasing dictatorship”); Daniel Libeskind’s slashes and zigzags (“similar to runways in a typical small airport[…]a trick he justified after the fact with fanciful pronouncements”); Steven Holl’s Swiss-cheese holes (“No ophthalmologist would recommend staring into such a wall”); and Frank Gehry’s metal lumps, which are now causing high-profile litigation (“shockingly large for no obvious purpose unless to prostrate all visitors before the gigantic ego of the architect”). Who is to blame for the success of these repeat offenders, producing uncomfortable, taxpayer-subsidized works that routinely leak and run hundreds of millions of dollars over budget? Clients who “allow themselves, through vanity, gullibility, or timidity, to be seduced.” Clients who lack “the courage to just say no.” Phew, someone finally said it. Or, rather, said it again; you’ve likely read similar rants about the emperor’s lack of clothing from Tom Wolfe, Classical architect Steven Semes, and prolific, witty journalist/blogger Francis Morrone. But unlike Wolfe, Semes and Morrone, Silber doesn’t really offer any workable alternative to “starchitecture.” He offhandedly mentions a few kinds of structures he does like, including Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion and Seagram Building (“stunning masterpieces”), Santiago Calatrava’s lacework, and Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House. Silber, of course, approves of his own B.U. additions, including a 1983 roof that the Boston firm Rothman Partners Architects planted over a disastrously leaky patio at Josep Lluís Sert’s 1960s student union. This slim, ultimately unsatisfying book would have made better use of trees if the publisher had attached the text to more substantive essays, perhaps by Morrone, Wolfe and Semes along with John Massengale, Andrés Duany and James Howard Kunstler. Silber’s salvo could be updated with news of ever more structural problems and dysfunction at Deconstructivist buildings, and serve as an opener to a full-blown manifesto about more durable and commodious forms of architecture and urbanism. TB |
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