My Two Polish Grandfathers by Witold Rybczynski

Author:Witold Rybczynski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2013-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Virtute et Labore

My ambitious student thesis was a hotel in a forest, and resembled a bridge: a high-tech Xanadu.

The early years of an architecture curriculum are devoted to teaching the basics: how to draw, build models, design simple structures. The student learns about building materials, foundations, and functional planning. At some point, these skills and this information have to be combined into a building design. It is a little like swimming: you learn the principles, but at some point you just have to jump in. At first, merely staying afloat is an accomplishment, but quickly you get used to the water, stop flailing around, and start to actually swim. During the fifth year (McGill’s was a six-year course), with the basics of architecture under our belts, we were expected to begin to find our own voices. This was the year in which differences in ability, imagination, and talent began to make themselves felt. Architecture is competitive, no less in the classroom than in the real world. There were three of us in the vanguard: Richard Rabnett, a serious, taciturn rugby player from Toronto; Andrejs Skaburskis, a tall Latvian, and, like me, an immigrant; and I. Richard excelled by reason of his sound analysis of problems, and by simply outworking the rest of us. Andrejs, who was a skilled amateur painter, had an artistic streak that manifested itself in powerful graphics. I, capitalizing on my model railroading experience, built intricate models, with stick figures and make-believe trees: a school with a roof that could be lifted off to reveal the individual classrooms; a housing project with an atrium roof of transparent acrylic, scribed to simulate a space frame.

We did not compete for grades, although these were important, especially if you were a scholarship student, as Andrejs and I were; what we valued was one another’s esteem and, above all, the favor of our professor. Norbert Schoenauer, our studio master, was generally considered the best design teacher in the school. He had just won a national competition for the Fathers of Confederation Memorial Building on Prince Edward Island, drew beautifully, read widely, and had published a book on courtyard housing. Schoenauer was in his early forties, born in Hungary but educated primarily in Denmark, where he had absorbed a humanist Scandinavian approach to design. He spoke slowly, with a thick accent, but that just gave him more authority. “You should live as if architecture were the most important thing,” he used to tell us, “but you should remember that it is not the only thing.” He had studied city planning, and he broadened my view of architecture. I learned that while buildings were sometimes sculptural and dramatic—like the Le Corbusier works I had admired the previous summer—they were also places for human activity, and personal aesthetic concerns should never be allowed to override this basic consideration.

Schoenauer introduced us to housing, a field in which he was a recognized expert. It is hard to overstate the position that housing occupied in the field in the mid-1960s; it was not a branch of architecture, it was architecture.

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