INSITES
TLTL
COURTESY OF GEORGE BAIRD FONDS, UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY
CANADIAN ARCHITECT 09/21
40
PUNDIT OF THE PUBLIC REVIEW
Trevor Boddy
A NEW BOOK OF ESSAYS CELEBRATING THE WORK OF GEORGE BAIRD DOUBLES AS AN ACCOUNT OF THE CLIMATE OF ARCHITECTURAL IDEAS IN EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA FROM THE 1960S TO THE PRESENT. When academic stallions are sent out to pasture, the last thing some are saddled with is a festschrift. These are collections of laudatory essays from colleagues and former students. While appreciated by their subjects, these books are often of limited impact and import, and—like most end-of-career gifts—wind up on display on office shelves. What University of Toronto Daniels School professor Roberto Damiani has created is not a token festschrift in honour of his colleague George Baird, but something much more interesting, original and enduring. The Architect and the Public: On George Baird’s Contribution to Architecture is nothing less than a comprehensive account of the climate of architectural ideas at all stages of Baird’s career, from when he obtained his B. Arch. from the University of Toronto in 1962 right up to the present. Contributing essays and interviews to the book are international beacons like Kenneth Frampton, Joan Ockman, Michael Hays, Mark Baraness and Peter Eisenman, plus such leading lights of Canadian architectural culture as Bruce Kuwabara, Louis Martin, John van Nostrand, Hans Ibelings and Adrian Blackwell. Because of the range of these contributors and the depth of their ideas, this book is essential to understanding the life and work of the most important architectural thinker Canada has ever produced. Since most of his career was devoted to writing and teaching architecture, and less to the design of buildings, it is a sign of just how inclusive Canada’s architectural culture has become that George Baird was awarded the RAIC’s Gold Medal in 2010. In similar fashion, the RIBA
CA Sep 21.indd 40
awarded its 2014 Royal Gold Medal to scholar-critic Joseph Rykwert, although it is impossible to imagine the AIA ever awarding its own Gold Medal to Peter Eisenman or Michael Sorkin. Many of Damiani’s contributors note that Rykwert is actually one of Baird’s key mentors, despite never having formally been his teacher or editor. London Versus New York As a Toronto architecture undergraduate, Baird travelled to Finland on a 1959 exchange, sparking an interest in Alvar Aalto that led to a book on his work eleven years later. Baird met Rykwert after he moved to London in 1964 to pursue doctoral studies under Robert Maxwell at the Bartlett School, his intended subject being “The use of semiological concepts in architectural theory.” With not just semiology but the first waves of other French and Frankfurt School cultural theories in the air, Beatles-era London was a much richer milieu than Toronto or Helsinki, so Baird’s interests in art, literature, film, cuisine and music expanded while there. Frequent sparring partner Reyner Banham was down the hall at the Bartlett, and nearly all the other critics and theorists who would dominate English-language architectural writing for decades were publishing or teaching in London at that time: Charles Jencks, Colin Rowe, Alan Colquhoun, Kenneth Frampton and others. With the decline of the British economy and support for academe, within a decade, every one of them was teaching in the United States. Baird sat in on some of Rykwert’s Essex seminars (where Daniel Libeskind and Alberto Pérez-Gómez were students somewhat later); Rykwert forged links for the Canadian to start teaching and publishing in London. As one of the first architectural theorists to dabble in semiotic theory, a major legacy for Baird was his 1967 Roland Barthes-inspired essay “‘La Dimension Amoureuse’ in Architecture,” which was revised to become an anchor essay in the ambitious anthology he and Charles Jencks edited in 1969, entitled Meaning in Architecture.
2021-08-26 9:16 AM
