i was just wondering, because it seems to me that the general populace is much less interested in architecture than the other arts. sure, if you ask someone their favorite architect you’ll invariably get frank llloyd wright, but that’s probably because his name is the only one they know. even the most artistically apathetic can name 5 -10 painters, i’d presume. even with target’s contract with micheal graves, and the press over frank gehry’s crazy metal buildings, which seem very mtv-generation friendly, i still don’t think many people even notice architecture.
i went into the field as a cop out. my dad was an art teacher and i was a good student and had some artistic talent. i figured i’d take architecture classes the first year and then “find myself” and transfer somewhere else. but after seeing how exciting and wonderful a world architecture was in college, i fell in love. coming from the midwest i never really experienced any architecture other than historic mid-1800’s buildings, which are great but you tend to take for granted after awhile. i think to a lot of people architecture is an unknown world.
maybe people see architecture as a science instead of an art. maybe architects are appealing to the lowest common denominator and not pushing design. maybe it’s a lot of both.
this is just something that i’m struggling with after graduating from school, where your life IS design, and then getting out in the real world and pumping out CAD drawings until your mouse finger bleeds.
i just wondered if anyone cared. you can hijack this post and digress about your favorite architects, designers, whatever. i just wanted to get this out there.
Well, I care a LOT about architecture. One of the things I love about New York and Phila. is the old buildings (18th c. in Phila., 19th in NY) that you still find scattered about, among the largely hideous newer buildings. I think it’s a shame that architecture has become a “business” rather than an “art.” I guess a lot of it is unavoidable—you can’t HIRE stone masons anymore. But it breaks my heart to see lovely old buildings demolished, to be replaced with something that looks like a Kleenex box.
Well, here in Chicago, architecture is a significant part of the tourist industry. Guided tours by the Architecture Foundation. River and lake boat tours with architecture volunteers as guides. Books and pamphlets for self-guided architecture tours. They all seem to do business – in particular, I see the architecture tour groups wandering around downtown and gaping up at the builings seven days a week, and the line for the architecture boat tours is long even though the price is higher than competing ordinary boat tours.
I care passionately about it. As does my husband. But you know, the evidence around here indicates that people don’t value architectural significance in residential housing as much as they value convenience and square footage.
In other kinds of architecture, it seems that many people like what’s shiny and new. As long as it’s not too ugly. Beyond that, I think many people lack a framework for looking at architecture and a lexicon for discussing it. It’s not real common to learn about it in school–not with any depth. My own education in it has been self-taught and halting in its progress.
If I hear one more person say an architectural cliche like “the windows really bring the outside in” I’m going to freak.
What?! Have you not been to Columbus? Sorry, that wasn’t a flame, but it so happens that one of the greatest collections of modern architecture practically sits in your back yard!
Anyway, I love architecture, and I think most people are attracted to products with strong industrial design foundations even if they’re not consciously aware of the thought processes or names behind them. When Michael Graves’s line first appeared at Target, I parked myself in that aisle for a while to see what the reaction was (yeah, call me a design voyeur, ;)), and heard exclamations like “this is the coolest thing!” – as I don’t believe Graves has the public recognition of, say, Martha Stewart, I’d venture to say that the reactions are provoked purely by the products themselves.
There’s an interesting article in the May 2002 issue of Metropolis that talks about signature architectural styles:
Well, that’s something I hadn’t thought of before.
well, i didn’t grow up in indy, i just ended up here after school. i’m from a small town in southeastern indiana, where new construction consisted of wal-mart and gas stations.
in large cities buildings are part of the landscape, you can’t really ignore them. even if you’ve never heard of mies van der rohe, you can feel his influence (good and bad) all over every downtown in america. plus, large cities tend to be cultural centers, where art is at least getting lip service from people in power. in small town america, for the most part, art isn’t a factor. maybe it’s a midwest thing: the bible belt, conservatism, humility.
and i agree about gehry. i loved his earlier stuff. it was so unique and daring. but once he got into the titanium and amorphous petal-shapes, he’s been self-plagairizing.
there is a big problem with architects these days. the firm i’m at now is all about the bottom line. i understand budgets, deadlines, all of that, but an architect can work harder and come up with something better. we whine about all these roadblocks, when we could take that time and find out ways to get around them.
and quantity is the focus. more square footage for less money. that’s actually a developer’s tagline in town. one of my coworkers even used it as a justification last month, because he’s having them build a house for him. i find that inexcuseable. if architects don’t care about their own homes why would they care about what they build? and we’re quickly becoming irrelevant with that type of attitude. architects should add value to work, instead of trying to compete with builders. it’s impossible to outgun a developer when you’re talking about price per square foot. we need to convince people they need us. and the only way to do that is to get great work out there. catch 22, maybe, but it’s really the only way.
so i quit yesterday. but my new job looks to be geared towards quality and art. i won’t really know until i work there awhile, but i’m hoping they weren’t bullshitting.
My favourite McDonald’s in the world is on Nybrogatan in Stockholm. To be allowed to open there, they had to “blend in and show respect” for the old building. It looks like a library from a London Club for the Gentry. It may seem strange, when I describe it, but it actually works.
I’m a great fan of the Bauhaus / Funtionalistic era. FLW did some cool stuff and set a standard, but I’m not excited by his work.
I’m working in radio, but if had a choice to change carrer today, it would be to arcitecture. However, I can’t draw, so I’d prolly end upp designing public restrooms in Siberia, at best.
GOOD for you, Downbylaw! It’s not many people who care enough to actually change jobs. Tell me, I’ve never known anyone in an architetcural firm: sometimes I look at a new building. It’s your basic Box. Maybe it has a different color somewhere on it. But NOTHING in the way of any decoration or detail to entice the eye. And I think, “someone DESIGNED that? Someone spent MONEY on that thing? Doesn’t anyone have ANY pride in what they put up anymore?”
well, if your talking about the modern movement, there is a concept behind the design. mies van der rohe began designing the prototypes for half the skyscrapers that have been built in the last 50 years. now they look pretty generic, the basic “black box” you see in every skyline. but mies was trying to strip away all the extraneous anachronisms of the urban architecture of his time. he was trying to be honest.
all that stone you see on skyscrapers? it’s all applique. all those cornices and decorations? so much wallpaper. mies exposed the skeleton and celebrated it. function over form. he even coined the term “less is more.” now, those steel buildings are ubiquituous, but in mies’s day they were completely new and alien.
but you may just be talking about the general crap that gets built today. hey, even wal-marts are “designed” by architects. some firm produces probably 300 sets of construction documents a year for those things. and it’s good money, hundreds of firms would kill to get those jobs. that’s the problem, i think we’re our worst enemy. it’s all about the bottom line anymore, all about money.
I was talking more about the general crap . . . I think along the same lines as Tom Wolfe, in his “From Bauhaus to Our House.” I don’t say that EVERYTHING designed and built since 1920 is crap, but I do feel a LOT has been lost in the way of caring what the person-on-the-street sees and feels when approaching a building.
you’re absolutely right. architecture used to be a priority. it was art for the people, functional sculpture.
craftsmanship isn’t the same as it used to be. man-hours are just too expensive anymore. most of the monumental architecture from early last century would be insanely expensive to build today. it’s just a different time.
and so clients, architects, society, etc., grab onto modernism and exploit it. it can be done cheaply, so they run with it and it gets watered down into the utterly unimaginative crap you see being built every day.
but there is good architecture out there. you just have to keep looking.
I completely concur. The problem with Mies is that he made modernism look too easy. People see a big box and say, “hey, I can do that” and we end up with cities full of intensely boring, bland architecture. Mies however, was intenesely aware of proportion and detail, which actually make his buildings beautiful to look at. As an example, look at the Federal Center in Chicago. Three buildings placed on plazas, one flat, one tall, and one wide. They play off each other wonderfully. The seams in the stones in the plaza line up with steel beams of the building so that it seems as if the buildings grew out of the ground. Plus, the first floor is glass-walled and exterior fixtures are used inside, blurring the public space of the plaza and the semi-private space of the building. It’s all pretty amazing.
There’s at least one Doper missing from this conversation, but he’s so busy completing his degree in architecture that he can’t be disturbed right now. I’m talking about epeepunk, of course.
His thesis defense was last week, and he passed. It’s just clean-up and decompression time for him, now.
I love architecture. There is no style that I can’t find something to love about. I even love modern. Architecture is an art that artists make art out of. It’s glorious.
I do like the de Stijl kids, Mies and Gerrit Rietveld and that crowd. I’m sort of a sucker for that and Bauhaus and art nouveau type Gesamtkunstwerk-y set-ups. I also went to the Gamble house in Pasadena (Greene and Greene) a couple of weeks ago and that was nifty-- I’d never really looked at Arts and Crafts carefully before.
What I know most about is Romanesque-Gothic era stuff, but after about 1660 everything leaves me cold until the mid-19th C.
Well, nothing like looking at a thread only to discover you’ve already been mentioned.
To start, yes I care about architecture. I better. Eight years in school, massive career change and subsequent salary drop. I’d better love this
But the public perception of architecture is another matter. I see several trends, off the top of my head, that I think contribute to this.
[ul]
[li]Architects moved away from the role of Master Builder/Overseer and became “artistic” and left a void in residential design that developers/General Contractors filled[/li][li]Clients have become extremely focused on the cost of a building, and not on the value of a building. Good design is expensive because it often involves either better materials or more labor. Therefore, most clients won’t pay for good design.[/li][li]We as a profession suck at selling ourselves. What we can add to a building beyond the basic structual elements is unfortuneatly intangible, therefore difficult to explain or sell.[/li][li]There is a dearth of good architectural criticism in the newspapers, and few people who read newspapers which leads to the ignorance of the public to the role or the architect and the names of those doing interesting work.[/li][/ul]
I would also agree that an architect who chooses to build a standard developer house because it cheap is a hypocrite who should not practice. A classmate of mine had a long argument with her boyfriend about where they might live. He couldn’t see that living in a suburban sprawl house was a violation of her professional ideals. He is a web designer, so I suggested that she explain it to him by asking if he would use FrontPage to design his home page, because its easier.
I don’t know where to start, but publicity is probably the easiest place since it doesn’t involve as much money.
we have this half-assed young architects forum going in indy. it’s mostly good for nothing. but we talked about this problem a couple months ago. the guy i’m going to work for mentioned becoming his own developer. that’s what intrigued me about his firm. if he has the capital to get the ball rolling, we could do some great work. he talked about building a church to lease to some of the countless congregations downtown operating out of pole barns and modified houses. maybe some residential work as well. i love the idea of helping out the little guy, and doing work downtown, not out in some hoity-toity suburb on the north side.
You seem to be down on the profession partly because of your station in it. Did you expect to be fresh out of school and walk into an architectural firm and design multimillion dollar buildings?
The place you’re going to might be more concerned with quality and art, etc. but you may see none of that in your day to day work. You’d still be coming in at the bottom and someone has to do the drudge work.
