INTRODUCTION
A well-known architect once famously opined,
time immemorial to the present have achieved
in a moment of exasperation, that 98% of what
that status by doing something different: not
gets built and designed today is s**t. One has a
necessarily by being flashy, but through a fresh
suspicion that this is closer to the truth than most
or refined take on materials, massing, details,
of us architects would care to admit. Certainly,
proportions, contextual relationships. Now, the
this country’s ordinary streetscape architecture, with occasional exceptions, confronts us with a dismal array that offers precious little grace, respite or wonder. Strip centers, mcmansions, et al are easy targets, the product of a lowest common denominator condition shared among users, clients, developers, bankers, engineers, and architects themselves, notwithstanding a smattering of good individual buildings and attempts at thoughtful urban developments. Those of us with a modicum of awareness know
appellation of merde was meant to apply, one presumes, to the great unwashed of architecture and cityscape, and not necessarily to our foregrounders—at least, not quite so much. But there are issues of accelerating peculiarity in recent times that do apply to many of the latter, and an examination of those is our subject. The broad-brush evolution of architecture through history consists of long periods of development and refinement, interrupted by
it’s bad, from sea to shining sea, and have a
lacunae such as the “dark ages” or game changers
pretty good idea why.
such as the industrial revolution. Moving on,
But that is not our subject. By and large the mission is to focus not on that vast and depressing expanse but on what we used to call foreground buildings: the attempts to stand out from that background. You know them when you see them, and all common building types
James Stevens Curl brings us exhaustively through the 19th and early 20th century origins of modernism in a recent controversial book, only to heap vitriol on the Le Corbusiers, Mies van der Rohes, and Gropiuses of early modernism itself, and pretty much everything
ORO Editions
may be represented—residential, commercial,
that has happened since. Notwithstanding
institutional, the lot—but the distinguishing
the deserved status of certain buildings from
characteristic is that of standing out from the
“modern times” as masterworks, one is inclined
pack in some way. In and of itself this is not
to agree that a certain measure of that vitriol is
a bad thing; the most admired buildings from
indeed warranted.
