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(airy, pleasant music)
- Welcome to A Conversation with History.
I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute
of International Studies.
Our guest is Paul Goldberger,
who is a contributing
editor of Vanity Fair.
From 1997 to 2011,
he served as the architecture
critic for The New Yorker,
where he wrote the magazine's
celebrated Sky Line column.
He also holds the Joseph Urban Chair
in Design and Architecture
at the New School in New York City.
He was formerly dean of the
Parsons School of Design,
a division of The New School.
He began his career at the New York Times,
where he was architecture editor,
and he won the Pulitzer Prize
for distinguished criticism.
He's the author of several books,
most recently, Why Architecture Matters,
and Building up and Tearing Down:
Reflections on the Age of Architecture.
He is the 2015 Hitchcock
Lecturer at Berkeley.
Paul, welcome to our program.
- Thank you, nice to be here.
- Where were you born and raised?
- In New Jersey, actually.
In suburban New Jersey, which
is sort of a little odd,
when you think that I'm
such a devoted urban person,
such a city person.
I grew up in Passaic, New Jersey,
and grew up in a nearby town
called Nutley, New Jersey,
which is these days, I think, best known
as the hometown also of Martha Stewart.
- Ah-ha! (laughs)
- Who I did not know growing up.
We went to the same high school,
but I think I was in the third grade
when she was in high school, so.
- I see, and looking back,
how do you think your parents
shaped your thinking about the world?
- My father was trained as a teacher,
and then became an editor and publisher,
and my mother was a teacher
and speech therapist,
so I grew up in a family that,
I guess you could say
was certainly literate
and cared about the written word.
I've never figured out where
my architecture side came from
(laughs) because they were
not people with any background
or unusual degree of
interest in that world,
but they were very much
people who were interested
in writing and literature and journalism,
and things like that.
So the side of me that
went in that direction
very much came from them, and certainly,
clear communication was
something I got from my father,
very much, who was a
relentlessly sharp, smart editor.
In fact, I remember, (laughs)
when he died a few years ago,
giving a eulogy in which I said,
"It's a shame that he's not here to edit
"all of the comments today
"because I'm sure all of
us would end up 30% shorter
"if he were editing all this stuff."
(laughing)
He was great at sort of
taking out unnecessary things
and teaching me that often,
you communicate most
clearly in the simplest way.
- [Harry] And writing
architecture criticism
is very complicated
- Yes, it is.
- [Harry] 'Cause you want to be clear,
- Right.
- But at the same time, I noticed
in some of your pieces that I've read,
that you really have to get
into the complexity of the structure,
- Right, right.
- [Harry] And describe it
so people can visualize it,
if you don't--
- Absolutely, absolutely, yes.
- You write in one of your
books about the importance
of memory, and both of these
towns that you mention,
you believe really shaped
your maturation, in a way,
- [Paul] Sure.
- As you saw the, sort
of the contradictions
between city and village, and
talk a little bit about that.
- Sure, I was very lucky in so many ways
'cause the town I grew up in,
this little town called
Nutley, New Jersey,
was not that far from New York City,
so I was exposed to the city,
and that whole world was 10 miles away,
but it was not just a bedroom suburb.
Some people did commute.
My father was a commuter into New York,
but there were other people
who worked in factories
and stores and were very local,
and for all it mattered to them,
New York coulda been
a thousand miles away,
not 10 miles away.
So I had some of the experience
of a kind of self-contained small town
and some of the experience
of a metropolitan area,
and I thought I grew up in both,
and it was a very mixed, interestingly,
heterogeneous kind of town.
There were kids who graduated
from the public high school
who went to Harvard, and
kids who went to the Army.
So there were all kinds of people there,
which was really great experience.
It also, maybe most importantly,
taught me a lot about
physical fabric of a place.
What made it really
unusual is the fact that,
at the main intersection
of the two main streets in this town,
was the high school football stadium,
and across the street from
it was the high school.
The other side was the junior high school.
The other side was the library,
the bank, the town hall, the fire station.
All these things were kind of arranged
in this little civic center,
and it looked almost like what you would,
the little plastic
buildings you might put up
if you had a train set or
something, thinking of it.
- Or something from a movie.
- Or something from a movie, exactly.
And so it taught me a lot
about symbols and towns
and the fact that you could walk
to and from all these places.
I walked to school my entire career,
even through high school.
And then there was also a main
street with all the shopping,
and it really kind of worked.
And I think it still sort of works.
It's not changed all that
much in all these years.
- So this gave you that
sense of the civic center,
even though you're writing
a lot about big cities.
- [Paul] Yes, definitely.
- But the life of the streets,
even though this is a small-town version.
- Well, that's absolutely
right, and in fact,
whether it gave me a
taste for bigger cities
or made me realize the
importance also of neighborhood
and breaking things down in scale.
- And community, yeah.
- And community, absolutely.
I mean, we knew all our neighbors.
I remember, you know, I can still picture
the people who lived in the
house on each side of us,
and across the street, and so
forth, and the walk to school.
- You also describe in your
book on Why Architecture Matters
your living situation.
When you grew up, your
grandparents were upstairs.
- In the very first house
I was growing up in,
in Passaic, New Jersey, yes,
we lived in a two-family house.
They'd call in Chicago, I
guess, a duplex or something.
And my grandparents owned the house.
They lived on the upper story.
We lived on the lower story.
And not only was there that closeness
of family and community, but
I remember as a little kid
being very struck by the fact that
the rooms looked the same
because the configuration
was identical above and below,
but they also looked and
felt completely different.
'Cause my parents had
very modern furniture,
and things were painted light colors,
and my grandparents
had this sort of heavy,
old European furniture,
and the walls were dark,
and there were heavy, damask draperies,
and all that stuff.
And I don't know quite
why and how I saw it
because there obviously
was some instinct in me
that made me receptive to
this kind of observation,
but I saw that these places were the same,
and yet, different.
And I began to think about what it meant.
I don't know how conscious I
was of it at the time, either,
but as I thought back, it
became a very important memory.
Just as when we moved to our own house,
in this nearby town called
Nutley, it was sort of a bigger,
single-family sort of
a vaguely Queen Anne,
Victorian sort of house.
And it did have a certain
kind of, you know, presence,
that the other house hadn't.
And I began to feel that.
The other thing I really took
from that town I grew up in
was a sense that public space
was a big part of the place,
that you didn't feel, if
you lived in a private,
single-family house, that
you were in an enclave,
separated from the world, the
way people often do today,
behind gates, behind hedges, behind.
You know, every house was open.
Nobody had a front yard that
wasn't sort of open and visible
as you walked down the street.
Two blocks away was a park,
which led to another park,
which led eventually
to the center of town,
with all the stuff I was describing.
And so the public realm, you could say,
played a huge role in the way
that little town was shaped,
which is very different from most suburbs,
which are really much
more about private space.
- Where were you educated, then, at?
- Well, I went to the public high school
in Nutley, New Jersey,
and then went to Yale.
So I went to New Haven, Connecticut,
which was the farthest away
I'd ever lived at that
time, actually. (laughs)
- And at Yale, both in
your studies, I gather,
and in the setting,
- [Paul] Right.
- You move further along in this direction
of doing architecture.
- [Paul] Absolutely, yes, yeah.
- Talk a little about that.
- [Paul] Sure, sure.
- So first the setting.
- I had begun through high school
to become quite interested
in architecture.
And I wasn't sure I wanted
to become an architect,
but I knew it was gonna play
a role in my life somehow
'cause I just cared about
it and responded to it,
and I had seen in magazines
these very interesting
new, modern buildings at Yale,
which they'd built in the '50s and '60s,
quite a lot of unusually
important buildings.
Those first got me interested
in going there, actually.
And when I was lucky
enough to be, in fact,
to get in and be able to go,
I arrived and had a
very strange experience,
which is that I saw these buildings
that I'd been reading about
and seeing in magazines,
and I actually liked them
and found some of them
quite exciting, but then there
was all this other stuff,
this old-fashioned, sort of
pseudo-Gothic architecture,
much of it from the 1920s,
and I really liked that too.
And of course, if you were
serious about architecture,
you weren't supposed to like that stuff,
because it was fake.
Let's put that in quotes,
it was "fake," quote.
And the really serious, authentic stuff
were the modern buildings.
So how come these buildings
were so pleasurable?
How come they felt so good?
How come I liked them so much?
And so a lot of my time
there was sort of a quest
to try to reconcile these two things.
Maybe it's a quest I'm
still working on (laughs)
because I still like both traditional
and modern architecture,
and I've never felt
comfortable putting myself
totally on one side or
the other of that line.
- This must've sensitized you
to this historical dimension,
which is very important in your writing,
that part of the context of a building
is the history of the building
and then the history of the surroundings.
- Absolutely, you know, a building,
a building is almost
never an isolated object.
It's not a piece of sculpture.
It's not like this water
bottle, where you know,
only the shape matters.
Sculptural shape is part
of what architecture is,
but it's only a part,
and every building is
shaped also by its context.
It has to respond to its context.
We, in turn, understand it
through the context in part,
and at Yale, again,
I learned all kinds of lessons about that.
I mean, I saw how some buildings
responded very much to their context.
Others did not and really were
more assertively purely sculptural,
and also how those old buildings
kind of formed a context.
They made an urban fabric.
They made a larger place
than any individual building can make.
You know, the fundamental
architectural idea of a city
is that the whole is more
than the sum of the parts,
and I think I began,
through all these places,
to sort of figure that
out viscerally for myself,
that the whole is more
than the sum of the parts.
- In retrospect, do you
think a place like Yale
would be different than
a place like Berkeley
because of the private
funding, the private endowment
that makes it what it is?
Private money making possible a setting.
- Right, right, right, right.
That's an interesting question.
I mean, Yale is certainly
different from Berkeley,
whether private money is the factor,
or whether it's East versus West,
public institution, in terms
of management, not just money,
and private institution which
also has more freedom, to.
- To layer upon layer.
- Right, right, there are
many, many differences.
All that said, you know, I mean,
they're both truly great
universities with enormous reach
and scope to them, and
depth and complexity,
as institutions, and none of them are ones
that you can easily characterize.
Probably the most important
difference, though, is scale.
Yale, while it's big,
compared to a small, liberal arts college,
is small compared to
a place like Berkeley.
And so that, I think, scale was
one of the things that help.
Just as, in fact, growing
up in a not-so-big city,
in a sort of small-town type city,
helped me understand certain things
that might've been harder to
see in a huge place initially,
and then I could apply what
I learned in a huge place.
Similarly, Yale was big
enough to have all this stuff
that taught me all these lessons.
And yet, not so gargantuan
that, as a freshman coming in,
you're kind of overwhelmed by it.
- At Yale, who were your
intellectual mentors?
- My most important intellectual
mentor was Vincent Scully,
the great architectural history professor,
who is actually still alive.
He's 94, living in
retirement in Virginia now,
but still around.
He was an especially meaningful
mentor to me, I think,
but there were others as well.
I had a wonderful city planning professor
named Alex Garvin, who
is also still around,
who is a planner in New York
who had gone to Yale and
taught part-time there,
and has done so, well,
for more than 40 years
because I was his student 40 years ago,
and he continues to do
that, in fact, yeah.
- So under these, and probably others,
how did your thinking
about architecture mature
as a kind of of a stepping stone
to becoming an architectural critic?
I mean, did you,
from one of your lectures that I read,
you really learned that you
could have both passion and,
but also be critical at the same time.
- I think that was one thing
I very much attributed to Vincent Scully,
who was a particularly passionate
and emotive and emotional scholar.
And learning that, in fact,
feeling and intellectual perception
are not mutually exclusive.
And that, in fact,
one must try to integrate
those two things,
rather than deny one side or the other.
And that, in fact, we can have, I think,
his term at one point was,
we can have both empathetic
and associative
relationships with buildings.
Associative meaning through ideas
and other kinds of
intellectual connections,
empathetic through feelings.
And that was absolutely true.
The other thing I took from
my education in those days,
that I, was important
because it is something
that every young person
has to learn, I think.
Is that there are no ideologies
that really answer all
questions, that in fact,
none of them are really right.
And when you're young, you
tend to sort of fall prey often
to belief systems and
total thought systems
that provide answers.
I learned, as a student, to
be suspicious of all of them.
Which is not to say that
they're all nonsense,
but it's to say that,
at the end of the day,
you will do far better if you don't
count on one to give
you everything you know,
but take the best from various things,
and try to synthesize.
That Jane Jacobs, to cite an
important influence for me,
and so many other people in those days,
is mostly right, but not 100% right
and doesn't explain everything.
That her opponents may have been wrong
about many, many things,
and wrong about her,
but not wrong about everything else.
And that sometimes, to stay
on Jane Jacobs for a moment,
you know, she was famous as
an opponent of Robert Moses,
and most of the time correct
in her opposition of Moses.
That didn't mean that every, single thing
Moses ever did was wrong.
Similarly, Lewis Mumford, the
great architectural critic,
who was another important
influence for me,
was also a very eloquent and
longstanding opponent of Moses,
but he and Jacobs didn't
agree at all, and in fact,
they disagreed about what
was wrong with Robert Moses,
even though they were his two most famous
and articulate opponents.
And so you realize it's not a simple
black-and-white situation.
You know, it's, everybody's
a various shade of gray.
(laughs) And you try to
navigate through them
and learn what you can from both of them,
and then figure out what
you believe in yourself.
- In your book, and I'm
reminded of it right now,
you talk about buildings as
being, serving a function,
but also having the potential to be art,
and so in a way, this recognition
of the importance of function grounds you
in a kind of practicality that
makes what you just said--
- Yes, but it's never only that.
- [Harry] No, right, right, I was just.
- Right, but that's exactly the point.
For me, it's never a matter
of either/or, it's both/and.
That, in fact, architecture is not art
or function and practicality.
That whole argument, that whole dialectic
is fundamentally wrong because in fact,
the most important thing
to know about architecture
is that it's both of those
things connected, and it's,
that any successful work
of architecture has both
a functional and an aesthetic component,
and we have to sort of
understand and respect both
and judge both.
I mean, it may succeed on one
level and fail on another.
It might fail on both levels.
It might succeed on both levels. (laughs)
But it has some degree, it's both.
- I like to ask my guests
what are the skills
and temperament required for
the career that they've chosen,
as advice for students,
and one of the senses I'm getting from you
is that doing architecture
criticism involves complexity.
- Yes, I think it does.
It involves complexity and a
willingness to see the world
in this way that I've
described, as both/and,
rather than either/or.
Definitely it does that.
I think it involves a
desire to communicate
and an ability to communicate clearly,
but if we can take a step back from that,
it's about sharing your
passions in certain ways,
and I mean, I love architecture.
I love sharing with other
people what it means to me,
and I love fighting for
better architecture,
which is what criticism is,
at least partly, trying to do.
- So it's about ideas,
- [Paul] Yes, mm-hm.
- Passion about ideas
and about structures,
but also a mission of being an educator.
- I think it is.
It's interesting you say that
'cause I've always felt that,
and I see the two different
parts of my career,
'cause I also spend part
of my life as an academic,
and part of my life as a journalist,
as reinforcing each other,
not as entirely separate.
- And as a critic,
you're not primarily a theoretician.
- [Paul] That's right.
- Although you know the theory.
- [Paul] Yes.
- And I think at some point you wrote that
a theorist wouldn't
necessarily make a good critic,
although he could be.
- I think that's
absolutely right, and yes,
I appreciate you noticing
that little sentence
buried down there somewhere
because it's absolutely right.
I think, in fact, sometimes
a theorist is a poorer critic
because, if a theorist really
believes in his or her theory,
then they believe in a much narrower
realm of possibility, let's say,
and would be inclined to discount
what fell outside of their theory.
Well, an awful lot of
the world is inevitably
gonna fall outside of any theory,
and does that mean you reject
all of it and ignore it
as a critic because it doesn't fit within,
or you criticize it only for
not conforming to your theory?
Well, at that point, criticism
becomes pretty meaningless
because all it is is an
evaluation of whether or not
a particular work falls
under this relatively narrow
umbrella or whatever.
I don't think that's a viable
way to write criticism.
- And what about temperament as a critic?
One thing that I'm hearing you
say is you have to maintain
your sensibility to the wow
moment, gee whiz, you know,
so there's a childlike quality there,
of seeing something for
the first time with awe.
- I hope so, I mean, I hope.
I think I've always been
a critic with enthusiasm.
I don't want my enthusiasm
ever to cloud my judgment.
(laughs) I mean, I don't.
I hope I'm sophisticated enough
not to say, "Wow," to junk,
but nevertheless, I
think if you don't bring
some degree of enthusiasm
and love to the subject,
you can't be a good critic.
Doesn't mean again that you love
individual things you're writing about.
I should hope you're critical enough
not to love most of them,
but that you love the field
in general and the ideas behind it
and the greatest experiences
that you might get from it,
and that you have curiosity.
You know, I think to
continue to be curious
is the most important way
not to become old and stale,
really, actually. (laughs)
And as you get older,
that's harder in some ways,
because there's always a sense that,
you don't realize it 'til you get older,
but you are very stamped by,
something in your brain is very stamped
by everything that was going
on when your career began.
I mean, I remember thinking
that, when I was a young critic
and observing how
much interest Ada Louise Huxtable,
the first architecture
critic at The New York Times,
and a woman who was an
extraordinary writer and journalist
and critic and the mentor to
so many of us, myself included,
Ada Louise still seemed
very much in thrall
to I.M. Pei, and Edward Larrabee Barnes,
and a lot of modern architects
who came of age in the 1950s, as she did.
And you sort of often
continue to dance to the music
that was playing when you first arrived,
even as you do evolve and see new things
and understand them.
My point is only that
one has to make a greater
and greater effort to stay connected
and be curious, really too.
- Help us understand how you do your work,
even as you're changing over time.
So in other words, when you're
looking at a new building,
you obviously know the other buildings
that architect has done
- [Paul] Sure, sure.
- But you're trying to relate it
to the history of
architecture, in a way, yeah.
- Right, right, right, right, right.
Well, I've just written,
just the other day,
I had occasion to write something about
the new Whitney Museum by Renzo Piano
that is opening next week in New York.
It was an interesting case study in a way
because it required knowing
something about museums in general,
something about the specific
history of the Whitney Museum,
particularly its Marcel Breuer building
on the Upper East Side of New York,
which it was vacating to
go to this new building.
It required knowing about
Renzo Piano's other work,
which was entirely relevant,
and it required knowing something about
the physical setting of this museum,
which is next to the High Line,
the new elevated park in the
Chelsea section of Manhattan,
near the Hudson River.
It's a very important and changing context
in a different part of the city.
So I was in a lucky situation there
because all those things
were things I knew
and had been thinking
about for a long time,
but if I hadn't been,
I would've had to have gotten up to speed
on all of those things to
evaluate that building properly,
and to really get all the
issues that appropriately
should be raised in a discussion of it.
I mean, it has to be
evaluated again in terms of,
you know, how does it work
for the display of art?
How does it feel as you are
a visitor going through it?
How does it feel if you're just walking by
and not going into it?
What does it say on all these levels?
- And in addition, because
a building is being built
at a particular time,
- [Paul] Right, mm-hmm.
- With political constraints,
financial constraints,
- [Paul] Yes.
- A whole array of
problems that essentially
have to be integrated in your analysis,
- Yes.
- [Harry] Even if you
don't write about them.
- Absolutely, you have
to know all that stuff
and understand it to evaluate
the building properly,
which does not mean that you have to
forgive certain things because of it.
It just means you have to know.
I mean, if a building
took a particular shape
for a political reason,
because it was forced,
the architect was forced
to by the city planners,
or by the zoning laws,
that's one thing that you need to know.
That doesn't mean, as I
said, therefore it's okay,
but you need to know that it was not just
an arbitrary and whimsical decision.
However, maybe something else
was an arbitrary and whimsical decision,
and you can't evaluate it
properly without knowing.
On the other hand, it's
also important to remember,
that an explanation is
not an excuse. (laughs)
And so to be able to explain something
is not necessarily to
say, "Therefore it's okay
"because I know why and
how it happened that way."
- And so, as you write a review,
how long does it take you to do that?
I mean, do you, and also do
you go to the building twice,
several times, to reinforce
whatever impressions
you're getting, and so on?
- Sure, I try to go to a
building multiple times.
I try to spend, I almost
always will walk through it
with the architect or the client,
depending on who's available, or both,
to hear what they asked for,
what they thought they were getting.
Again, it doesn't mean I
necessarily agree with it,
but I want to hear what they
believed they were doing.
And not necessarily to, you know,
use their good efforts as an excuse
for accepting things that
I don't feel are adequate,
but nevertheless, it's important to know
what they thought they were
doing, what they wanted to do,
what they set out to do.
If it's a building like a museum,
where I can put myself in
the experience of the user
because I go to museums,
I know what it's like to
look at art, and so forth,
that makes it a little bit easier.
There are other kinds of buildings
where it's important to talk
to the people who use them
because they may see things
that I don't see necessarily.
- So a consumer of sports, yeah.
- Right, right, exactly.
I actually am interested
in sports, and so,
but nevertheless, you know,
I've never, I sit in the stands,
I've never been on the field
playing baseball in a baseball park.
It's important to sort of know
how it works at all levels.
A hospital.
It's important to see it
from a patient's perspective,
most of all, but also from the perspective
of those people who
work with it every day.
And sometimes those things take research.
Now, it's also true that
all buildings evolve
and change over time, as
do our perceptions of them.
I've often thought it
would actually be very good
if architecture critics could make a habit
of revisiting buildings, let's say,
five years after they were finished,
and reevaluate them, reevaluating them.
I think we would sometimes find
that our original views were right,
and we would sometimes find
that our original views
were off-base, that we missed something,
that five years of human
life have changed things
in a certain way, and maybe
made some things work better,
maybe shown that other
things were a mistake.
So I wish we could do
more of that, actually.
We don't, not because there's
any policy against it.
It's just, journalism is hard these days.
It's under greater pressure than ever.
It's hard to do much
architecture criticism at all.
And it's harder still to
take time to do things
that are not viewed as
essential, and of course,
the public is understandably,
wants to know about new
things because they're new,
and then it gets hard to go
back and look at older ones,
but we absolutely should.
Ideally, we would be doing that.
- An example of that, you
talk about in your book,
which is the modern
addition to The Louvre,
which you didn't like.
What was it that changed your thinking,
going back to it again and again?
- Sure, I.M. Pei's glass pyramid, that is,
it's the entrance to The Louvre,
I thought was an
inappropriate intervention
of modern architecture into
this very traditional precinct,
and a degree of change that
was not appropriate for it.
And I was wrong.
I am very happy to admit
that I was wrong on that one.
It was built.
The world did not collapse.
The Louvre actually got somewhat better.
It, in fact, respected the
classical order of The Louvre
better than I had given
it credit for being.
And I've also become much more
sympathetic in recent years
to really good modern additions
to historic buildings.
I've just finished working on a book
with the architect Norman Foster,
who has made something of a specialty
of doing works of that type,
that is called Building with History,
that is about very sort of
assertively modern buildings
that are juxtaposed next to,
or are often additions
to historic buildings
that respect the historic building,
but not in the obvious way
of mimicking it in any way,
but by being modern, but by taking cues
and doing certain, subtle things
that show that great
attention was being paid,
and great respect was being
shown to the older building,
but just in a way different
from imitating its architectural style.
And certainly the I.M.
Pei pyramid at The Louvre
was a good example of that.
He understood that original building
and respected it totally.
He just didn't follow
its architectural style
in any literal way, and as time went on,
it became very clear that he was right,
and the critics who had doubted
whether it was a good idea,
like me, were wrong.
In fact, I'm always very
willing to admit when I'm wrong.
I hope it isn't too often that it happens,
but when it does, I think it's,
one is honor-bound to say so.
- You make the point that, as a critic,
you have a set of values and principles,
- [Paul] Mm-hm.
- On the one hand, but you distinguish
how you have to approach the
architect and his intentions
- [Paul] Right.
- And at that point, you have to,
"Well, what were his
problems, and how reasonable,
"and how, yeah, how
reasonable is his solution
- Exactly.
- "To those problems?"
Which is essentially drawing on
all this complexity that
we've been talking about.
Talk a little about that because
my guess is that you
are, in your own values,
politically and socially,
are on the liberal side of the equation,
but you're really willing
to respect the architect
for responding to the situation
he was presented with,
and the problems.
- An architect has no
choice but to respond
to a situation he's presented with.
If the situation he's
presented with is unacceptable,
then the architect should resign.
I mean, if it cannot yield a building
that he or she feels
they can stand behind,
rather than producing a bad building,
the architect should step aside.
But, and I think it's important
to understand intentions
when we're in the realm
of much more normal,
conventional buildings, not buildings
that raise some ethical
issue, but just regular,
everyday buildings, but to understand
is not necessarily to accept.
I think if I've made
any mistake as a critic
or had any weakness as
a critic over the years,
it's that I've sometimes given
too much credit to good
intentions, actually.
Because most architects
have good intentions.
Very few architects
approach a problem and say,
"Okay, how can design a
really horrible building
"that is going to offend the
client, offend the public,
"and fail to function?"
You know, not terribly often
do they start out that way.
So the intentions are usually good.
And it's the critic's job
to understand the intentions
but also to go beyond them.
Because if the critic is limited
by the architect's intentions,
then he or she is not
bringing anything really smart
and meaningful into the discourse.
- You say, at one point,
"Architecture can never be
"wholly divorced from politics."
We've been talking a little about that,
but this is really especially
true when the building
is of symbolic importance,
- [Paul] Sure.
- Where politics is
raised to a higher level.
We're thinking here of
the Vietnam Memorial,
the 9/11 Memorial, recent debate
about an Eisenhower Memorial.
- Yes, yes, yes, yes.
- Talk a little about that
because what in the end,
is the end result always,
"Well, did people wind up liking it,
"even in the process that
there was much opposition
"of putting the design on the table?"
- Right, right, right, right.
Well, you raise three really important
and compelling examples.
They're a little bit different.
The Vietnam Memorial is
an extraordinary work,
and I think one of the great
works of the late 20th Century.
It was attacked at the beginning
by some people who felt that
it was excessively abstract
and would not be able
to adequately represent
the feelings and the
anguish of the families
who had lost people in the war.
We have seen, in fact,
that the opposite was true.
That it, in fact, spoke
powerfully to people,
and that the representational
statue of soldiers
that was placed on the grounds
as part of the memorial,
as a way of placating the opposition,
that's what actually seems
now to be superfluous
and mawkish and not very
communicative at all.
Thankfully, under pressure
from Maya Lin, the designer,
who was not able to prevent
its inclusion totally,
nevertheless it was pushed
somewhat to the side
so it doesn't directly interfere with the
experience of being at the wall itself
that is the central part of that memorial.
The 9/11 Memorial, I think
is also quite successful
actually, and both of them
together are reminders
that it is possible to
create a somewhat abstract
simple form that is not
directly representational,
that in fact does communicate
to a lot of people,
and that speaks to everyone in a profound
and moving and beautiful way,
and is appropriate to its particular site.
Each of these are.
You know, the Vietnam Memorial,
it's not just that V-shaped wall.
It's the subtlety of how the wall points
to the Lincoln Memorial with
one point, one direction,
and toward the Washington Monument
and the Capitol in the other.
And how it subtly goes down,
and you sort of move away from the Earth,
and then you return and have
this sense of resurrection
almost, as you come back up to that,
is extraordinarily powerful.
Similarly, at the 9/11 Memorial,
because those squares are
the footprints of the towers,
the power of the place, the
power of that specific design,
and that specific place,
joins with the power of the abstract form
to be very, very important.
Eisenhower, now, is
another story altogether.
That's a design by Frank Gehry,
a great architect in
my view, not one noted
for memorials or public
buildings in Washington.
It's been very controversial,
partly because the family of Eisenhower,
many members of the family of
Eisenhower are not fond of it.
They have found common cause
with a group of very conservative
architects and activists
who are fighting the memorial
because it is not classical,
it's not traditional,
it doesn't look like the Lincoln
Memorial, or what have you.
I think they're wrong.
I think the memorial is a strong design,
and I hope it gets built.
And it's very, very honest
in its tribute to Eisenhower.
I mean, they're saying
crazy things about Gehry
trying to destroy Eisenhower's reputation
and suggesting that all is chaos
because the stones don't
line up right, and so it.
I mean, that's just
philistine, basically I think.
- And politics.
- And politics, exactly, yeah.
Cultural politics as much
as political politics.
Politically, Frank Gehry
has said to me that he,
in fact, one of the reasons
he's wanted to do this
is because the more he
learns about Eisenhower,
the more he admires him,
the more impressed he is at
what Eisenhower stood for.
And frankly, this country
could benefit I think
a little bit from a
little more Eisenhower,
which I never thought I would be saying,
but you know, Eisenhower actually said,
"We have to recognize
that every war plane,
"every bomber we build,
"is that many more children going hungry,
"that many more people
going without clothing,
"that many more people not being educated,
"that many more people not being housed."
Can you imagine,
a Democrat wouldn't dare say that today,
let alone a Republican,
and the fact that a Republican President
of the United States said that
in a speech to the nation,
amazing to think.
So in fact, it's a very good
moment to honor Eisenhower,
and I think the political
argument against the memorial
is cultural politics, it's
about Frank Gehry's aesthetic,
and about how some people believe that
you can only use a classical
architectural language
to memorialize somebody and
honor the dead, and so forth.
And I don't believe that's
true, and I think, in fact,
the Vietnam Memorial and the 9/11 Memorial
both show us otherwise.
- In your writings on architecture,
the notion of history and
of time are very important,
and I don't just mean the
history of architecture.
- [Paul] Right, right.
- I mean what time does to a building,
what time does to our
appreciation of a building.
Talk a little about that
because how do we get a handle on that?
Do we just wait and see what time brings?
- I think maybe we do just wait
and see what time brings. (laughs)
Except knowing that
everything always changes,
that the relationship
is always a dynamic one,
it's not a static one.
And multiple things are changing
because all of us individuals
are changing and growing,
and our perceptions
evolve somewhat over time.
Culture at large is changing and growing.
History is moving on, and
that changes attitudes often.
And then buildings themselves of course
are not static, and they change.
They change even if we
don't try to change them
because if we leave them
alone, they will deteriorate.
They need tending to be kept the same,
and sometimes we change them anyway,
we overtly intervene and change them.
So everything is changing all the time.
That's why, in the book,
Why Architecture Matters,
I try to separate out what I
called architecture and memory,
which is much more about
our own personal histories,
and how they relate to buildings.
And then buildings and
time, which is much more
a kind of broader sense
of how architecture itself
changes over time, and how the culture
views it differently at different times.
To go back to the beginning
of our conversation,
when I talked about coming to Yale,
in part because I loved the
new, modern buildings there,
and then discovering that
the more traditional ones
also appealed to me, that was
an almost radical position
for a student interested in architecture
to have at that time.
Now, it wouldn't be anymore.
Now, I think it's widely understood
how good those buildings
were, and in fact,
Yale is expanding with two
new residential colleges
that are being done in
a traditional mode now,
following the lead of those
ones from 90 years ago.
So the culture has
evolved in a certain way.
Some might say it has
not evolved positively,
and that it might've been better
if Yale had commissioned someone
who was more at the
cutting edge to do that.
I sort of felt that, myself,
somewhat, but we'll see.
Maybe these will turn out okay.
I don't want to judge them
yet, until they exist.
- Time also brings a
change in the materials
that are available
- [Paul] Sure, technology always, always.
- The technology, always the technology.
- I mean, from, go back
to Gothic cathedrals
and flying buttresses.
Architecture has always
used the latest technology
and demonstrated it and that
in turn, has determined,
you know, what we can build, sure.
And it all evolves over time,
and our perceptions are
evolving at the same time.
And the other thing that
I think evolves over time,
that makes architecture
different from other things,
is our, let's just say our
tolerance, of architecture
because architecture's always there.
It doesn't go away.
It's always there to be seen, you know.
We have a tendency to kind
of accommodate ourselves
to it a little bit, which
I think we have to do
as a gesture of protection.
You know, if there's music you don't like,
you don't listen to it.
If there's literature you
don't like, you don't read it.
But if there's architecture
you don't like,
you don't have the luxury of not seeing it
if it happens to be on your route to work,
or what have you.
So we learn, I think, to have
a degree of tolerance for it,
which is both good and bad.
It saves us from being
crazy and angry all the time
about how horrible everything is,
which would make it hard to live.
On the other hand,
sometimes it could also
encourage complacency,
which makes it harder to
push to make things better.
- And as history sweeps
forward, shall we say,
over these buildings,
buildings can change and
adopt to new values, really.
- Sure they can, absolutely.
- So that in preserving them,
we're seeing a lot of that
in Oakland, for example,
where a lot of the older buildings
in downtown are becoming
restaurants, and so on.
- Look at all the old industrial buildings
that have become residential
lofts in San Francisco,
in Oakland, in New York,
all over the country.
As manufacturing has
departed from central cities,
as they have become more
residential as places,
as more people have wanted
to live in the city,
which I think is a very good thing
for our society in general,
thousands of industrial
buildings have been repurposed,
most often to residential
use, and very positively so.
I mean, all that is a very good thing.
- And the city, going back
to our original discussion,
is where a lot of the
good things are happening,
but some bad things also.
And you quote Lewis Mumford as saying,
"In a city, time becomes visible."
And let's explore--
- Such a wonderful just,
talk about saying so much
with so little. (laughs)
- (laughs) Yeah, right.
And is there anything we can add to that?
I mean, to help people
understand it, if they don't?
I mean, as the history becomes important,
as does the change in the
history, I guess is what.
And it's layered, and it's all there.
- It's always layered,
it's always layered.
It's not an argument for
preserving everything, of course.
- [Harry] Right.
- In fact, if anything, it's
an argument for making sure
that historic preservation,
important though it is,
doesn't dictate every,
single decision that's made
about planning and building cities
because of the various,
one of the layers of time
that we have to make sure
is still visible is
the present, of course.
You know, a city is not a theme park.
A city is not a make-believe place,
and beautiful though the
buildings of the past can be,
essential as they are
for our ongoing life,
we don't want a city that
consists only of them, either.
And so layering involves integrating
the present and the past
effectively, I think.
- We went through a period,
and you've written about it,
in which the cities were deteriorating.
The suburb was seen as the ideal model.
Is that direction changing now,
and what are the positive forces
that are making the
city more viable again?
- I think we have a
generation now in their,
let's say 30s and 40s, who
are more attuned to urban life
than a generation or two before them,
than their parents or
grandparents might have been.
I think we have,
they're somewhat more sophisticated,
they're more interested.
The rise of the food culture
is in part, not entirely,
but in large part also closely tied
with a kind of rise in urban
culture in this country.
And there's a sense of sort
of more sophistication.
I mean, something as
simple as a farmer's market
is an indication of a different
set of attitudes about cities.
All of that is good.
I think the greatest problem is almost,
is that too much success of this
has raised the market such that
a lot of people are being squeezed out,
and that's a tough thing.
I mean, I spoke in the lecture yesterday
about remembering how, at
the beginning of my career,
you know, a journalist
could buy a big apartment
in New York, and raise a family there.
Well, you know, that doesn't
work that way anymore.
And that's a tragic loss
because we are losing
a degree of diversity in
cities that is part and parcel
of what cities should be about.
So you know, in every, as
I like to say sometimes,
in every silver lining,
there is a cloud. (laughs)
And in fact, the fundamentally good thing
about the renewal of cities
that we've lived through
in the last generation and
continue to live through,
the revival of Oakland,
the huge improvements
in so many other cities, and
the desire for downtown living
on the part of a much broader segment
of the population than before.
All of that is a fundamentally
good thing for our society,
but it comes at a price,
and the price is that it's
becoming harder and harder
to keep those communities diverse.
The creative people who ostensibly
are at the vanguard of
some of these changes,
are themselves being squeezed out.
I'm gonna talk about that
in the other lecture.
It's a huge problem in San Francisco.
It's a huge problem in a lot of places,
but we also have to remember
that much of the revival of Oakland,
not all of it, but much of it,
has come about because of
people who could not afford
to live in San Francisco or Berkeley,
who might otherwise have
chosen those places,
a generation ago would've
chosen those places.
So within all of this is both a reminder
that cities are living places,
and there is ebb and flow all the time,
and that there is you know,
to use that word that all
the tech people like so much,
there is disruption that
has both good and bad sides.
- One final question,
- [Paul] Sure.
- If students were to
watch this interview,
what advice would you give them
with regard to preparing for the future,
and they see as architectural
criticism an element of that,
but they also are committed to values
that say, "Let's change the
world, and make it better?"
- I would like to hope
that an architecture critic
can change the world.
I'm not so naive as to believe
that it's all that easy,
or that an architecture critic
can change the world that much.
But I'd like to hope that
arguing for better architecture
is part of what has
brought about let's say,
a more sophisticated, a more
visually literate generation
because they've been
exposed to more writing
and more public discourse
about some of these issues,
and we want that to continue.
For a student, it's a tough
time because we have a paradox.
We have greater interest in the issues
of architecture planning,
design, preservation, urbanism,
than ever before, I think,
that's the good side.
We have journalism and the vehicles
through which this
discourse can take place
in a lot of chaos and disarray
and dramatically evolving,
and nobody really knows
how the pieces are gonna fall together.
There are great opportunities
for a younger critic
to be seen and heard through blogs,
and that kind of thing.
But one can also disappear
in that world of the internet very easily.
And so in architecture, as
in almost all of journalism,
all of that stuff is still shaking out,
and it's gonna be a long time
before whatever new pattern
it sets is fully there.
- Paul, on that note thank you very much
for being on our program.
- Thank you.
- And thank you very much for joining us
for this conversation with history.
(airy, pleasant music)
