On Architecture by Ada Louise Huxtable

Author:Ada Louise Huxtable
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2000-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Herdeg zeroes in on the details of these two perfectly dreadful façades—Franzen’s at 800 Fifth and Johnson’s at 1001 Fifth— describing their formal and symbolic failures in almost clinical terms. Both façades, he says, “play out a literal heavy-handed charade” in their attempts to relate to their neighbors—a beaux arts apartment house next to 1001 Fifth and the small, Georgian Revival Knickerbocker Club next to 800 Fifth. Although each design “pays tribute to context” by taking its formal cues from the masonry, moldings, windows, or other details adjoining it, something has gone terribly wrong; both buildings are banal and busy caricatures. Johnson’s vertical bay window strips, “in dark glass and metal against off-white stone, run up the façade like so many zippers,” emphasizing rather than diminishing the effect of the building’s excessive height. The borrowed elements “appear to dissolve into an array of unrelated and therefore confusing anecdotes.”

Herdeg disposes forever of any architectural pretensions the two buildings may have. Of 800 Fifth: “The façade . . . appears as a non-façade . . . a tartan weave of glass, spandrels and wall.” Of 1001 Fifth: “The question presents itself whether this display of unnerving effects amounts to a deliberate use of irony for the purpose of reconciling conflicting conditions, or whether, because of self-contradictory design actions, essential order and control have been lost.”

If there is irony here, it is that both of these “decorated diagrams” are actually the product of New York’s standard speculator practice of dressing up the ordinary; the fancy false front, put on for the luxury trade, covers a conventional building, tricked up, in this case, by a pretentious postmodernist rationale. There surely is no more unsavory architectural formula. It is reaching hard, as Herdeg does, to blame this on the Bauhaus.

HERDEG ALSO DEVOTES a great deal of space to dismembering an earlier Philip Johnson building of the fifties, the Sheldon Art Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska, done when Johnson was first breaking with the International Style and flirting with history. He makes a detailed comparison with a museum that was greatly admired by Johnson’s first, modernist mentor, Mies, and has since become an icon of the postmodernists: Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin. This is a building that has been referred to repeatedly and respectfully by Johnson in both his modernist and postmodernist periods.

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