Architects are always in a precarious position. Unlike doctors and lawyers, their services are never required. (There are only a few exceptions.) If you need design services, it's just as easy to hire a contractor or engineer to slap something together. Architects are an additional expense, and they have a reputation for being difficult and impractical. (Case in point: President George Washington had to fire Pierre L’Enfant, the brilliant planner of the nation’s capital, for insubordination.)
In the past, architects overcame this challenge by demonstrating the superiority of their skills and knowledge. Their buildings were simply better. Now, however, few people believe that. The reputation of architects is at its lowest point ever. They are perceived as being problem-causers, not problem-solvers. They are purveyors of the ugly and dysfunctional, of the emotionally detached and culturally disconnected.
As I previously noted, the profession is collapsing from within as more and more insiders have been admitting the failure of contemporary architecture. The latest obituary is an essay in Architectural Review by mainstream critic Peter Buchanan, who writes, “Future architects will look back at our times astounded by our confusions, gullibility and inability to exercise critical judgement… [M]uch contemporary architecture is sh*t.”
Likewise, Alastair Gordon, contributing editor for architecture and design at the Wall Street Journal's magazine, comments in the Miami Herald, "It’s hard to find much in the way of inspiration or direction from mainstream architecture these days. Indeed, the profession seems largely on the defensive, lurching towards a nervous breakdown."
With the reputation of architects in free-fall, the American Institute of Architects, the main trade organization for the profession, recently launched a three-year public relations campaign called I Look Up. According to Robert Ivy, the organization’s CEO, the chief message of the campaign is “Architecture has a beneficial effect to change our lives for the better.” Observe it’s not “Architects are changing our lives for the better.” Is that too hard of a sell?
More broadly, Ivy said the campaign aims to “Reach not just clients but a woman who’s going to serve on a school board, … the person who may run for public office, … the developer who is right now in graduate school,” and also people who pass through public spaces (i.e., everyone else).
The centerpiece of the campaign is the AIA’s first ever TV spot. Ninety seconds long, it has all the trappings of a Generic Brand Video: the hipster with funky hair, contemplative scenes of nature, time-lapse photography, urgent strings and echoing piano, pretentious blather in a sonorous voice: “The world is counting on us to look ahead.” What the commercial does not show is a single client or a person using a building. It suggests that architects build for no one but themselves. The video is all too accurate.
As the name of the campaign suggests, the AIA believes that by encouraging people to look at buildings, they will somehow see the value of architects today. But the AIA is oblivious to the fact that the more that ordinary people consciously observe new buildings, the more they will see the bad in them. People will ask themselves, “Why does that school look like an office park? Why does that courthouse look like a prison? Why is that concert hall an alien spacecraft? Why does that brand-new house look like it’s been damaged by a hurricane? What’s with all the boring glass box commercial buildings? Why can’t I find the entrance to the building? Why is the Freedom Tower so uninspiring?”
The AIA’s cluelessness is further evident from the website for I Look Up. It features a video paean to the John Hancock Tower in Boston, which was designed by the world-famous architect I.M. Pei. It’s hard to see how the building, completed in 1976, can be lovable since it is nothing but mirrored glass panels on a sharply angled slab. The tower is a Modernist 60-storey skyscraper slammed next to the human-scale Copley Square and historic Romanesque Trinity Church by Henry Hobson Richardson. The tower does not engage with its surroundings in any meaningful way, and it has no relation to Boston’s history or urban fabric. It is a faceless, uncivil design that is as friendly as a state trooper staring at you in reflective aviator sunglasses. The former dean of MIT’s school of architecture called the building a “monster.”
The great irony, as the AIA ought to know, is that the tower is one of the most famous architectural design failures in history. Soon after it was built, the windows kept popping out—and it was a miracle that no pedestrians were sliced in two. I Look Up so I don’t get killed! (Given that John Hancock is an insurance company, the building was doubly bad for business.) All of the windows had to be replaced at great cost. During the repairs, all 10,344 windows were temporarily replaced with plywood. The joke was that the tower was the tallest wooden structure in the world, the Plywood Palace. The client wasn’t laughing.
But it was still worse. According to the book I. M. Pei: A Profile in American Architecture:
It was not until 1988 that the public learned that there had been problems with the building even more disturbing than those of the glass… [A]n engineer had discovered that the building might, under certain wind conditions, topple over… As a result, the building was, while still under construction, virtually disemboweled and rebuilt with an additional 1,650 tons of steel bracing costing some five million dollars. [emphasis added]
And that’s not all:
Then there was the wind, which because of the tower’s shape and position, gusted around the bottom with frightening force. Pei’s partner Henry Cobb lamely apologized, “I’m sorry that people get blown off their feet, but we could not let that become decisive in the design. In order to achieve resonance between the tower and the church, we had to be single-minded.”
A skyscraper that could have killed people by wholly collapsing or by shearing them in two with glass, a building that sweeps people off their feet (literally)—the John Hancock Tower is a classic example of Modernist architecture’s expensive, functional failure—and its lack of concern for human beings. (For an overview of the technological failure of 20th-century architecture, see Peter Blake’s book Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture Hasn't Worked.) Despite the disaster, the AIA gave the building its prestigious 25-Year Award.
It’s worth adding that Pei, who was subject to a massive lawsuit and was almost driven out of business, later built the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which was also a functional failure. A mere 27 years after it was completed in 1978, the exterior marble panels that clad the entire structure were tilting outward and were in danger of falling. Every single panel had to be replaced at a cost of $85 million.
Before that, in the 1960s, Pei was responsible for the siting of Boston’s downtown Government Center. One of the worst failures of “urban renewal” in the country, it is notorious for its oppressive Brutalist City Hall and moonscape of a plaza, an anti-place hostile to living things such as Bostonians. Pei is also to blame for L’Enfant Plaza in D.C., another large-scale urban renewal disaster.
So much for an allegedly great American architect. Of course, Pei received the AIA’s Gold Medal, the organization’s highest prize. The American Medical Association, by contrast, does not hand out awards to doctors who nearly killed their patients through repeat negligence.
The AIA demonstrated further cluelessness on the website by posting a video praising a work by starchitect Frank Gehry, who is so famous that he has designed concrete cufflinks for Tiffany & Co., a twisted handbags for Louis Vuitton, and a crumpled hat for Lady Gaga. The clip focuses on the house Gehry designed for himself in a traditional middle-class neighborhood in Santa Monica, California. In 1978, Gehry took a pleasing house from the 1920s and exploded it with plywood, chain-link fencing, and corrugated aluminum.
Modernist architects love the building, which resembles a Cubist haunted house. But, as Gehry notes in the video, his neighbors hated the rude structure. He says he was drawn to the chain-link aesthetic “because it was so universally hated” [emphasis added]. No one would want to live in a neighborhood of houses like that. It is an experimental art object incongruously situated among ordinary houses. It is a work of in-your-face sculpture, not architecture. Tourist buses swing by to gawk at the freakshow.
In the video, a chuckling Gehry reminisces that when a neighbor complained about the house, the architect pointed to the neighbor’s trailers, corrugated metal fence, and car on his lawn and said, “I’m just relating to you.” In other words, Gehry was telling him, “My house is no uglier than yours.” Read between the lines and Gehry is revealing his passive-aggression. As Gehry admitted previously:
[M]y house is in a middle-class neighborhood. .. I was trying to understand my middle classness architecturally. So I said, “The next-door neighbor has a chain-link fence. The next guy has a corrugated metal this. There are boats in the back yard. That guy has a trailer in his front yard. Some other guy has his car up on blocks.” And I said, “This is the neighborhood I’m coming into.” I used all that as input to design and build my house. I didn’t realize that there was a certain amount of anger in that from me. . . . Later, I realized the upset that I had caused in the neighborhood. [emphasis added]
If anger toward one’s neighbors is what you seek in a house designer, Gehry’s just the guy for you. He sees ugliness in the world and throws it back in your face—magnified 100 times.
The AIA’s website also features a video lauding architect Thom Mayne, who received the AIA’s Gold Medal. Working at the most jagged part of the cutting-edge, Mayne designs menacing buildings that look like something out of a dystopian science fiction movie. (The name of his firm, Morphosis, sounds like the evil villain in a comic book.) His San Francisco Federal Building is a schizoid robot and an insult to the federal government and the people it serves. The disorienting, helter-skelter interior looks like it’s already been hit by an earthquake. His Cooper Union building in New York City looks like it has been smashed by a giant object; it is a work of fear.
Mayne has outright admitted that his buildings are inhumane. He told an interviewer that architecture should have an “aggressive attitude towards the public.” And according to an article on a talk he gave at Cornell’s architecture school, “Mayne admitted to wanting to create demanding, art-for-art’s-sake architecture that only other architects can appreciate.” What Mayne confessed holds for many other prominent architects, who are likewise building aggressive, incomprehensible structures. Mayne is not designing for the nice lady on the school board.
Stuck in an echo chamber, the AIA fails to consider that their problem is not fundamentally one of public relations—it is the product: the junk that architects are churning out. Modern architecture is a form of environmental pollution that is bad for our health. The I Look Up campaign asks us to inhale deeply, to taste the acrid, cancerous soot.
Further evidence that the AIA is out of sync with and condescending toward the public can be found in its architectural guidebooks. For instance, the third edition edition of the AIA Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D.C. heaps praise upon hideous mid-century buildings, including the U.S. Tax Court Building and Brutalist FBI Headquarters—a veritable Ministry of Fear. At the same time, it calls the Jefferson Memorial (1943) a failure. We stupid Americans are told that the memorial—one of the most beloved buildings in the country—is “tired and passé” and “just doesn’t work.” The book also takes swipes at the U.S. Supreme Court (1935) and West Building of the National Gallery of Art (1941). You see, the real (unstated) problem is that these are classical buildings built in the “modern era.” The cult of Modernism finds that anathema. Amusingly, the book is coy in its description of the AIA’s own headquarters (1973), which is an anonymous gray-and-black-ribboned building that stinks of bureaucratic malaise. The architect clearly knew his client well.
The AIA’s problem is not just with external relations; it is also suffering internal discord. Numerous members have accused the organization of slighting everyday architecture and the needs of ordinary architects in favor of starchitects who gallivant around the world building flashy buildings (many of which are embarrassing technological failures). For the AIA, architecture is first and foremost the work of jet-set messiahs who attend all the best cocktail parties.
Another complaint—more severe—regards the organization’s ideological lockstep, its moribund opposition to diversity. The AIA is dominated by a Modernist orthodoxy hostile toward traditional and classical architecture and urbanism. You can flip through years of back issues of Architect magazine, the AIA’s flagship publication, without being able to find a single example of traditional architecture being highlighted. The publication is all about the fashionable, the glitzy, and the experimental—of empty, “daring” innovation and technomania. You would never know that traditional architecture is in the midst of a renaissance. You would never know that many young members of the creative class choose to live and work in historic urban neighborhoods. You would never know about the Institute for Classical Architecture and Art; the American College of the Building Arts; the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism (INTBAU); or the exciting new CARTA Center for Advanced Research in Traditional Architecture at the University of Colorado Denver.
You would never know that polls have found that the public has a long and enduring preference for traditional and vernacular architecture. Indeed, in 2006-7 the AIA created a poll, with a methodology weighted in favor of Modernist architecture, to determine Americans’ top 150 favorite buildings. Embarrassingly for the AIA, the top 50 included only eight Modernist buildings. Many “important” Modernist buildings didn’t make the top 150 at all. The poll has since disappeared from the AIA's website. (You can find three-dimensional renderings of the winners here.)
To counter the AIA’s stultifying monoculture, a few months ago a number of architects began circulating a petition calling for stylistic pluralism within the organization and in its magazine. According to one signatory:
The publication Architect is not representative of the practice of architecture today, especially in the area of residential design. Homeowners want traditional and vernacular design inspired homes. The vast majority of homes built in the United States are attempts at designing traditional houses. However, because aspiring architects who graduate from accredited architectural schools have no exposure to or knowledge of traditional design, the houses that they design are poorly designed and destroy the neighborhoods where they are placed. Therefore please include examples of traditional and vernacular architecture in your magazine so that aspiring architects and architects can [at] least see good examples of architecture that is not modern. Your view of the built environment is very myopic.
As well-intended as it is, the AIA’s I Look Up campaign is, like Modernist architecture, doomed to failure. What the institute requires is internal change—change that could help lead the profession out of its self-imposed crisis. What the AIA needs is not a PR campaign but an organizational one: I Look Inward.
