Acute Angles - Form Follows Function

by David Fidelman

Until recently, most people didn’t consider archi-tecture as an art form. Except for a few famous structures – the Sydney Opera House in Australia, the Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, to name a few of the best known – buildings were mostly considered as places to live in, work in or store things in. As the architecture critic of the L.A. Times put it: “A decade ago, architects were a cultural aberration, wallowing in the language of arcane French philosophers and I-beam details.” Architecture was an esoteric subject, and articles on the subject were generally put in the back pages of the Arts and Leisure section of the newspaper.

Today, architecture has entered the mainstream of American culture. Fashion magazines and fashion designers have discovered the talents of architects. Magazine publisher Conde Nast asked Frank Gehry – who designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain – to design the cafeteria for its New York headquarters building. A top architect has been commissioned to design three boutiques for the luxury fashion house Prada, as well as to rethink the design of several magazines.

No reasonably well-informed person can afford to be ignorant of the major architectural trends. At the very least you should know the names of some of the famous architects of the past – Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Sir Christopher Wren who designed St. Paul’s Cathedral in London – as well as the names that regularly show up in crossword puzzles, like I.M Pei and Eero Saarinen.

From the Renaissance until not too long ago, architects and builders thought they could find an absolute set of principles that would guide the design of buildings. First they looked for a geometric rigor that would reflect the natural order of God’s universe. Next they tried classical precedents, then started looking to the future for a new architecture whose clean lines and abstract forms would rid the world of undue clutter. Finally they gave up and now everybody is doing his own thing.

If you want to spice up a conversation, bring up the subject of architectural aberrations or errors in judgment. As Frank Lloyd Wright said, “The doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines.” England’s Prince of Wales, obviously unhappy with the kind of construction going on in London, said in a speech, “You have to give this to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings it did not replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.”

You can the question the appropriateness of the Guggenheim Museum opposite Central Park on Fifth Avenue between 88^th and 89^th Streets in New York. The building is an inverted ziggurat – a stepped or winding pyramidal temple of Babylonian origin – a sort of upside-down circular pyramid that looks completely out of place for its setting.. It was originally intended to be placed inside Central Park where it would have looked spectacular, but when permission was denied, it had to be located on a city street. Doubts have been raised about the basic concept of the building. The conventional approach to museum design, which leads visitors through series of interconnected rooms, is dispensed with. Here they take an elevator to the top of the building, then walk down a continuous ramp, with the pictures on the outside walls and an open rotunda in the center of the building. The spiral slope means that the pictures are never parallel to the ceiling, while the limited width of the ramp keeps the viewer from getting really far enough back to view some of the paintings. Women wearing high heels are not all that comfortable walking downhill all the way.

Ask anyone who has taken a good look at ASU’s Gammage Auditorium, if they’ve ever wondered about some of its external design features. What is that draped curtain motif all about? It turns out that in 1957, Frank Lloyd Wright was hired to design a cultural center in Baghdad. But in 1958 King Faisal II was murdered in a military revolution, which put an end to the project. When ASU decided to build a concert hall, Wright pulled the drawings out of the files and sold the Baghdad building to the university. After all, a desert is a desert, whether it’s in Arizona or in Arabia. The building could have been even less appropriate to its surroundings but fortunately, to reduce the cost, the dome that was part of the original design was removed in favor of a flat roof.

Anyone interested in knowing more about architecture should learn something about the Bauhaus, the Modernists and Post-modernists, Minimalism, and try to figure out what Deconstruction means.