Irony free zone (2)
Aug. 25th, 2008 02:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
libertangoI've written before about Nicolai Ouroussoff's ventures into self-parody. Today, the most influential architecture critic in the US (which the New York Times' architecture critic is, pretty much by default) decides he was just wading before, and would like to go to the deep end of the pool.
The ostensible reason is an article in praise of Lebbeus Woods. It's OK if you've never heard of him -- Ouroussoff likes that, and Woods has had few buildings built.
The two are not disconnected.
"When I was an architecture student in New York in the early 1990s, the architects my peers and I admired most were famous for losing competitions, not winning them. For us it simply meant that their work was too radical, too bold for the cultural establishment."
We learn many things in this passage. First, it turns out that Ouroussoff really is a character straight out Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House, of a type that Wolfe rightfully made endless fun of. He's a cap-M Modernist, unapologetically so.
But also, for all that he repeatedly sounds like a writer of an earlier generation -- perhaps the scion of Tsarist diplomats, kneepad to kneepad next to Philip Johnson, worshipfully at the feet of Le Corbusier in the 1930s -- he is, in fact, younger than I.
We also learn that he values being "...too bold for the cultural establishment," which is another way of saying he doesn't mind roofs that leak. Since he's now a writer for the Times, one presumes he got over the more abstract points of this stance.
Yet he goes beyond that:
"But that (Woods) now stands virtually alone underscores a disturbing shift in the architectural profession during the past decade or so. By abandoning fantasy for the more pragmatic aspects of building, the profession has lost some of its capacity for self-criticism, not to mention one of its most valuable imaginative tools."
You heard it here first: If only architecture hadn't placed a "disturbing" focus on, you know, architecture, it could train that focus on drawings and sculpture and all those aspects of the craft that don't involve pesky things like clients, or weather, or materials, or the laws of physics -- which abstractions are architecture's proper domain.
When I read this to Ulrika, her response was, "It's good to know the Bush Administration hasn't totally cornered the market on irony-free discourse."
Quite.
The ostensible reason is an article in praise of Lebbeus Woods. It's OK if you've never heard of him -- Ouroussoff likes that, and Woods has had few buildings built.
The two are not disconnected.
"When I was an architecture student in New York in the early 1990s, the architects my peers and I admired most were famous for losing competitions, not winning them. For us it simply meant that their work was too radical, too bold for the cultural establishment."
We learn many things in this passage. First, it turns out that Ouroussoff really is a character straight out Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House, of a type that Wolfe rightfully made endless fun of. He's a cap-M Modernist, unapologetically so.
But also, for all that he repeatedly sounds like a writer of an earlier generation -- perhaps the scion of Tsarist diplomats, kneepad to kneepad next to Philip Johnson, worshipfully at the feet of Le Corbusier in the 1930s -- he is, in fact, younger than I.
We also learn that he values being "...too bold for the cultural establishment," which is another way of saying he doesn't mind roofs that leak. Since he's now a writer for the Times, one presumes he got over the more abstract points of this stance.
Yet he goes beyond that:
"But that (Woods) now stands virtually alone underscores a disturbing shift in the architectural profession during the past decade or so. By abandoning fantasy for the more pragmatic aspects of building, the profession has lost some of its capacity for self-criticism, not to mention one of its most valuable imaginative tools."
You heard it here first: If only architecture hadn't placed a "disturbing" focus on, you know, architecture, it could train that focus on drawings and sculpture and all those aspects of the craft that don't involve pesky things like clients, or weather, or materials, or the laws of physics -- which abstractions are architecture's proper domain.
When I read this to Ulrika, her response was, "It's good to know the Bush Administration hasn't totally cornered the market on irony-free discourse."
Quite.
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no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 03:15 pm (UTC)