the look of architecture






one
dressing up


Architecture is hard to define. Goethe called it music frozen in space, which, while it captures a sense of rhythm, is too one-dimensional. And it relegates the mother of the arts to an inferior position; just as well to describe music as melted architecture. Nietzsche believed that architecture reflected his pride, man’s triumph over gravity, and his will to power. This notion applies to many buildings, from Gothic cathedrals to skyscrapers, but it is too, well, Nietzschean. The British master Edwin Lutyens referred to architecture as a sort of play: “In architecture, Palladio is the game!” Le Corbusier described his art as “the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light,” which is a good description of one of his own buildings. I am partial to Sir Henry Wotton’s definition. Wotton, who lived a long time in Venice and was a lover of architecture though not an architect, published a treatise on the subject in 1642. “In Architecture, as in all other Operative Arts, the end must direct the Operation,” he wrote. “The end is to build well. Well-building hath three conditions: Commoditie, Firmeness, and Delight.”
Sir Henry’s description, which was based on the writings of the Roman architect Vitruvius, appeals to me because it emphasizes the complexity of the building art. To begin with, architecture has not one but three distinct purposes: to shelter human activity (commodity), to durably challenge gravity and the elements (firmness), and to be an object of beauty (delight). Architecture is always a synthesis of the three. However, the fulfillment of one purpose does not guarantee the satisfaction of the others. There are homely sturdy buildings and beautiful flimsy ones. A well-planned building can be ugly just as a beautiful building can function poorly. Form does not, contrary to Louis Sullivan’s hoary maxim, follow function.
Not only are function and form separate, over their long lives buildings can successfully accommodate a variety of uses. For example, some of the most famous museums (the Louvre, the Hermitage, the Belvedere) started life as royal palaces; the Uffizi in Florence is so named because it originally housed offices; and the Prado in Madrid was designed to be a museum of science, not art. The acclaimed Musée d’Orsay in Paris is housed in a railroad station. Two of my favorite small museums, the Frick Collection in New York City and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., were built as residences. As historic preservation and adaptive reuse demonstrate, you can shop in a renovated warehouse, do office work in a converted loft, or live in a barn. Assuming, of course, that the warehouse, the loft, and the barn were well built. The material fabric of old buildings—the heavy beams, rough brick walls, and solid woodwork—is one of their chief pleasures. That is why we feel cheated by hollow walls, flimsy doors, and shaky balustrades. Buildings should last and feel as though they will.
One might assume that just as the highest-rated cars—Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Lexus—represent the highest standards of automobile technology, the most admired architecture would be the best built. This was generally true in the past, but in the twentieth century, when new materials and new aesthetic theories often have driven architects to cavalier experimentation, even celebrated architects have fallen short in that department. Le Corbusier’s white suburban villas, for example, were crudely finished in cement plaster on top of brick, and since the architect usually ignored (for aesthetic reasons) intrusive metal flashing and coping strips, the crude “machines for living” often aged poorly. Some Frank Lloyd Wright buildings have leaky skylights, sagging overhangs, and defective heating systems. This does not make them any less delightful to visit, but it must make them considerably less delightful to inhabit. Perhaps the most dramatic example of failed experimentation in recent years is the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, which opened in 1977. The building was widely praised for its architectural innovation—the British periodical Architectural Design called it “a seminal building of the Modern Movement.” The architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers turned the building literally inside-out. They dramatically hung pipes, ducts, fire stairs, elevators, and escalators from the exterior structure. These previously hidden elements were now exposed in plain sight—and exposed to the elements. The result might have been foreseen: after only twenty years, the French government was obliged to close the building for a two-year renovation. Although the authorities maintained that the renovation was required because of the unexpectedly large number of visitors, according to Le Monde almost half of the $90 million budget was spent on refurbishing the façade.
The University of Pennsylvania, where I teach, is the site of Louis I. Kahn’s A. N. Richards Medical Research Laboratory. This structural tour-de-force of precast concrete and brick brought its designer international acclaim. I remember traveling from Montreal to Philadelphia as a student to see the building a few years after it was built. My classmates and I particularly admired the exposed concrete structure and the explicit separation of what Kahn called “servant” and “served” spaces—massive brick ventilation shafts and delicate, glass-enclosed individual laboratories. However, The latter proved to be unpopular with their occupants. The large windows let in too much light (today, most are papered over with aluminum foil), cement dust from the exposed concrete beams falls on the lab tables, and the rigid plan has proved inflexible to changing needs.
The Richards Laboratory was built only 35 years ago. It is next to a student dormitory known as the Quad, a picturesque Jacobean Revival complex planned around a series of courtyards. This handsome building has been doing yeoman service for almost a century. The Quad was designed by the Philadelphia firm of Walter Cope and John Stewardson, whose work at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Bryn Mawr was largely responsible for the popularity of so-called Collegiate Gothic. Pleasing, well-loved—and well-built—the Quad is architecture of the highest order. Yet my classmates and I did not pay any attention to the dormitory when we visited Philadelphia years ago. We had never heard of Cope & Stewardson, despite their achievements and wide cultural influence. The architecture historians whom we studied—Siegfried Giedion, Nikolaus Pevsner, James Marston Fitch—favored innovators and experimenters, even if the innovations and experiments often failed. Put another way, most historians of modern architecture gave precedence to Delight over Commoditie and Firmeness. This may be because the appearance of a building was easier to assess (especially at a distance) than either its functional performance or material durability. Or maybe they were attracted chiefly to the aesthetic qualities of architecture. In any case, “imaginative, inventive, and revolutionary” were more likely accolades to be showered on important buildings than “accommodating, dependable, and sound.”
This is not to say that good architecture is merely utilitarian. One of the grandest spaces in Philadelphia is the concourse of Thirtieth Street Station, which was built in 1934 for the Pennsylvania Railroad by the accomplished Chicago architects Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, the successor firm of Daniel H. Burnham. The magnificent room, 290 feet long and almost 100 feet high, is covered by a flat coffered ceiling decorated in red, gold, and cream. Diffused light streams in from tall windows on both sides. Almost nothing in this memorable space—the gilded Art Deco chandeliers, the travertine walls, the massive Corinthian columns at each end—was a product of its rather mundane function: to provide a waiting space for people, before they descended the staircases that led to the platforms below. But the railroad station concourse in the heyday of railroad travel, was more than merely a place to get on and off trains. It was a gateway to the city, as well as a symbol of unreserved faith in modern transportation—and in the Pennsylvania Railroad. That is why it was appropriate for delight to take precedence over commodity.
Yet delight is not uniform. The Main Concourse of Grand Central Terminal in New York City, for example, offers different pleasures than Thirtieth Street Station. The monumental spaces are comparable in size and function. They are both well built. Similar spaces, similar materials, yet the experience of the two concourses is different. Both buildings are inspired by the Classical architecture of the past, but Grand Central, which opened in 1913, is a modified version of Beaux-Arts Classicism, whereas the Philadelphia station, despite the Corinthian columns, is simplified, abstracted, and stylized, what historians called “stripped Classicism.” As a result, Grand Central is dramatic, visually rich in its details, almost Wagnerian; Thirtieth Street is equally dramatic but in a way that is coolly geometrical and sleekly urbane—not Wagner, Cole Porter. Style is evident in the smallest details. It ensures a continuity between the great vaulted sky of Grand Central and the ticket counters, or between the Thirtieth Street chandeliers and the announcement boards at each track stair. It is the visual language of a building. Architectural style is the manner in which the architect communicates a particular kind of visual delight, in large ways and small.
Commodity, firmness, and delight are never evenly weighted. Sometimes one predominates, sometimes the other. Sometimes a waiting room needs to be a triumphal celebration of arrival and departure—sometimes it is just a waiting room. Sometimes it is necessary to compromise structural simplicity to achieve an esthetic effect. Sometimes functional requirements override other considerations; a laboratory that does not serve its scientists is a failed work of architecture, no matter how beautiful its design. A banal church is a greater failure than a banal factory. The art of building requires judiciously balancing Wotton’s three conditions.
The end must direct the operation. That is what distinguishes architecture from the fine arts of painting and sculpture “An artist can paint square wheels,” Paul Klee once observed, “but an architect must make them round.” Architecture, in this respect, is no different than other “operative arts” such as cooking. The creativity of the chef is likewise circumscribed by factors outside his control—the natural ingredients, the human palate, the chemistry of foods. The dish must be at once nourishing (commodity), cookable (firmness), and, of course, tasty (delight). (It should also look good, although the contemporary trend toward visually extravagant dishes seems to me an aberration). The art of cooking, like the art of architecture, lies in knowing how to establish the appropriate relations between the three conditions.

The experience of food is sensual. It is also first-hand. That is, while it’s fun to read recipes and look at photographs of table settings in Gourmet magazine, no one I know considers this a substitute for eating. The experience of buildings is sensual, too. Yet, many of us get our first glimpses of buildings—particularly celebrated buildings—as images in books, magazines, newspapers, public lectures, and exhibitions. One of the most famous buildings of the Modern movement, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, was known almost entirely through photographs since it was built for an exhibition that lasted only seven months. Before photography, the Paimio Tubercolosis Sanatorium, located in a remote part of Finland, would have remained obscure; as it was, its stunning images brought the young Alvar Aalto worldwide recognition. The Sydney Opera House is another world-famous building that, at least outside Australia, relatively few people have seen first-hand. Yet photography tells us very little about how a building fulfills its function, or about how it is built. For example, the handrails in the often-photographed stairway of the Paimio sanatorium look like standard International Style metal pipes. In fact they are wood—much more pleasant to the touch—painted to look like metal. Well-known photographs of the Barcelona Pavilion show eight free-standing columns supporting a flat slab, and free-standing marble screens that carry no loads, a prototypical International Style structure. In reality, there are columns concealed within the screens, which are not slabs of marble but thin marble sheets attached to a masonry back-up wall. In other words, this 1929 building is an example of traditional layered construction, not of modernistic structural purism.1
In photographs, buildings are forever young. The ravages of time, weather, and use are banished. It is a shock to come across a revered architectural icon and to find the concrete stained, the painted window frames chipped, the tiles cracked. Of course, all buildings age, but some age more gracefully than others. A 450-year-old Palladio villa retains its beauty, despite peeling plaster and mossy stonework (perhaps it even looks more enchanting). Most modern buildings, on the other hand, lose their potency if they are not gleaming and machinelike.
Obviously, photography highlights the visual qualities of buildings and ignores commodity and firmness. Yet photography cannot completely communicate delight. A visitor to the Seagram Building in New York, for example, is surprised to discover the subtle relationship between Mies’ bronze tower and the Italian Renaissance façade of McKim, Mead & White’s Racquet and Tennis Club on the other side of Park Avenue. Equally deceptive are photographs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work in Oak Park, since they give no hint of the comfortable suburban surroundings of his so-called prairie houses. As I student, I studied the buildings of Le Corbusier in black and white photographs, which did not prepare me for the shock of experiencing his often wildly polychrome interiors. Nor can photography communicate movement, which is such an integral part of the architectural experience (film is better at this, but not much). Nothing conveys the actual experience of a building like the real thing. To paraphrase Robert Hughes, a photograph of architecture is to architecture as telephone sex is to sex.
Never is modern architectural photography more misleading than in its portrayal of domestic interiors. Interiors are usually photographed empty or with minimal furnishings, before the owners have had the opportunity to move in and (presumably) defile the purity of the design. But even if the space is occupied, strict conventions prevail: furniture must be lined up just so; there must be no distractions, no half-empty tea cups, no crumpled newspapers, no abandoned children’s toys. Books on shelves are arranged to create interesting patterns, personal mementos are temporarily banished—everything must be neat. I once observed a photographer’s assistant during a photo shoot comb out the fringe of a rug. Such primping and visual editing sets off the architecture to best advantage. It also—not coincidentally—gives the impression that the designed interior is autonomous and self-contained: in other words, that it is a work of art. Markedly, these photographs never include human figures. People would be the greatest distraction of all.
The world of buildings depicted in books and magazines is a scaleless, self-sufficient place. The absence of people in architectural photographs has several effects. In the past, the proportions and dimensions of buildings were based on the human body. While this was done for philosophical reasons, it also ensured a direct relationship between architecture and people—it is why even very large Classical buildings feel comfortable. By removing people from buildings, architectural photography makes it possible to regard architecture as an abstraction, unrelated to humans. It is not merely that the conventions of modern architectural photography ideally communicate the intentions of most modern architects, it is also that they validate those intentions. People? Who needs them?
While I was writing Home, I discovered that the most useful historical sources for information about how people furnished and decorated their homes were often paintings. Not paintings in which the room was the subject, but portraits and domestic genre scenes. An example of the latter is James Tissot’s, “Hide and Seek,” which shows four little girls at play in a Victorian sitting room. The décor is exotic, an eclectic mixture of Persian rugs, Chinese porcelain pots, and tiger-skins and others furs scattered over the furniture.
Tissot was a French painter who settled in London in 1871. An easel in the corner suggests that this is his own house, in which case, the woman sunk deep into an easy chair, reading a newspaper may be his Irish mistress. John Singer Sargent’s masterpiece, “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit,” painted in 1882, likewise shows four girls. Henry James described it as “the happy play-world of a family of charming children,” but the girls can hardly be said to be playing. Properly dressed in white pinafores, black socks, and patent leather shoes, they form a motionless tableau. The room, in an apartment in Paris, is stylishly bare, unadorned except for two immense Japanese vases and a red screen. The mood is entirely different in the Swedish painter Carl Larsson’s playful “Mother’s and the Cherubs’ Room,” which was included in Larsson’s famous book Ett Hem (At Home), published in 1899. The walls of his wife’s bedroom are wooden boards, whitewashed and decorated with a painted frieze of ribboned garlands; the ceiling, likewise wood, is painted green with red trim. The simple furniture is also painted in bright colors. Karin Larsson’s bed is separated from the children’s cots by a striped woven curtain. We see three of the Larsson girls in various stages of dress—and undress. That is appropriate, too, for naturalism and artlessness permeate this charming scene.
Such paintings are more faithful depictions of domestic surroundings than modern architectural photographs. For one thing, they are full of the signs of everyday life. A coat is thrown casually over a chair, there are crumbs on the table, Tissot’s little girl playing on the floor rumples the carpet. Moreover, in these interiors the architecture is in the background. It is a setting for human activity—just as it is in real life. Paintings also convey something about the atmosphere of the interior. Dutch seventeenth-century domestic paintings, for example, exude a prosperous air of bourgeois comfort and propriety. A hundred years later, François Boucher painted a middle-class French family gathering for morning coffee in a little room with japanned woodwork and gilded moldings. There is a sweet intimacy here that is absent in the Dutch interiors. An interior of the same period by Henry Walton shows an English gentleman at breakfast. He is sitting in a relaxed posture, wearing a riding-coat and boots, accompanied by his dog. The ambience is one of informal and relaxed country life.
As I studied such paintings, I started to see associations between the rooms and their inhabitants. The legs of the mahogany furniture in an English country house were as straight and unadorned as their owners’ riding boots. The arabesques and curlicues of the moldings and architectural ornaments in a French salon mirrored the flouncing ribbons that adorned the women’s dresses and the frills of the men’s shirts. The proper black broadcloth and white lace collars of the Dutch men and women echoed the spotless black-and-white checkerboard marble floors. I became convinced that a strong connection exists between the way that we decorate our homes and the way that we dress ourselves.
There are three distinct reasons for the intimate relationship between dress and décor. The first is technical. Décor, like dress, incorporates fabrics. Curtains, swags, and window-treatments are made of silk, damask, satin, brocade, wool, muslin, and velvet—so is clothing. Woven materials are used in tapestries, wall-hangings, carpets and upholstery as well as coats and skirts. Inevitably, the dressmaker’s techniques of embroidering, gathering, pleating, and trimming find their way into décor. This is why furniture skirts recall women’s skirts, and why the fringes, cords, and bobbins of nineteenth-century drapery recall ladies’ ballgowns. The delicate lace curtains and the billowing baldachin over a bed in a ladies’ boudoir matched the clothes in her dressing room.
The connection between décor and dress can be even more intimate, for architecture sometimes directly mimics dress. The garlands in eighteenth-century buildings are sculpted or painted versions of the sashes and flowered ornaments worn by men and women. The ancient Greeks incorporated elements of dress in temple architecture. This is most apparent in colonnades, which Vincent Scully has likened to hoplites massed in a phalanx.2 There is no doubt that Classical columns were given human attributes. Ancient authors likened the vertical flutes to the folds in a chiton, or tunic.3 Columns have capitals—that is, heads. The moldings of Doric capitals were sometimes painted to resemble headbands; Ionic and Corinthian capitals incorporated carved head garlands, and the curving tendrils of Corinthian capitals often look more like hair than foliage. Indeed, Vitruvius considered the Corinthian order “feminine,” as opposed to the sturdy masculine Doric. Sir Henry Wotton went so far as to call the Corinthian order “lascivious” and “decked like a wanton courtesan.”4
The second connection between dress and décor is social. In the 1890s, the famous English economist Alfred Marshall observed that as people earned more money, they wanted better food, better clothes and larger homes—both for social standing and comfort. Since homes and clothes are timeworn ways in which to convey status, there is a conformity in the types of materials and symbols used to convey social standing. If family coats of arms are displayed, they will be seen on wall medallions as well as on blazer buttons. If gold is treasured, the wealthy will wear gold braid and surround themselves with gilt moldings. If this is considered too flashy, other materials can convey status: stainless steel kitchen appliances and stainless steel watch bracelets. Diamonds may be forever, but fashions change. Today, leather is considered a luxury material, and is used both for expensive clothing and expensive sofas. A hundred years ago, leather was considered utilitarian; leather aprons and vests were worn only by workmen, and leather easy chairs were only found in smoking rooms and men’s clubs since leather was less flammable than fabric. But it was never used in salons or drawing rooms. When corduroy, originally used only in workingmen’s dress, became accepted by the middle class, it also showed up as upholstery. The current fashion for “natural” dress fabrics—cotton, wool, linen—has a counterpart in “natural” décor: exposed brick, oiled wood, polished concrete.
In a more general sense—and this has nothing to do with conspicuous consumption—both homes and clothes convey values. Carl Larsson’s home was a statement of both his and Karin’s naturalistic aesthetic ideals, so was James Tissot’s exotic sitting room. Whether or not we are artists, our homes, like our clothes, communicate who we are, or at least how we wish others to perceive us: starchly formal or comfortably casual, intensely avant-garde or resolutely traditional, bohemian or conservative, cosmopolitan or down-home. The Che Guevara poster on the wall and the embroidered denim jacket convey one set of values; Colonial break-fronts and penny loafers, another. That is why it is disconcerting if dress and décor are not in harmony. Sweat shirts and running shoes in a Louis Quinze drawing room send a decidedly mixed message, as does a three-piece suit on the deck of a Malibu beach bungalow.
The third connection between dress and décor concerns perception. Architecture, interior decoration, and fashion design are three distinct fields, yet we experience them with the same eye. Whether we look at dress or décor, we bring the same visual bias, the same sensibility, the same taste. This sensibility is not constant. Sometimes we appreciate simplicity, sometimes complexity. Fashionable seventeenth-century French eyes, for example, favored floral decorations and embroidery, and introduced the custom of having vases of fresh flowers in the home. English eyes in the midst of the Neoclassic revival sought fundamental simplicity and sobriety in men’s clothes as well as in architecture. Victorian eyes fancied dense patterns that were likely to show up in waistcoats and on wainscotting. Parisian eyes, in the early 1900s, admired the same neo-Empire motifs in dress and décor.*
Early twentieth-century eyes had their own particular sensibility. One of the great interiors of this period is the main living space of the Tugendhat House, designed by Mies Van der Rohe in 1928. The house stands outside Brno, Czechoslovakia. The exterior is a low-key International Style white box, but the interior is astonishing. The public rooms are contained in one large open space. A curved wall of macassar ebony defines the dining room, and a straight free-standing wall of onyx dorée separates the music room from the living room. The space is punctuated by slender cruciform columns covered in chromed metal. The east and south walls are floor-to-ceiling glass—a precursor of Mies’ famous glass house. The sense of openness is heightened when, at the touch of a button, fifteen-foot sections of the glass wall sink into the ground.
I have never seen the Tugendhat House, except in a handful of black-and-white photographs (the house was severely damaged during the Second World War). This is another case where photographs are a poor substitute. They do not convey the rich textures of the raw silk and velvet draperies, nor the vivid colors of the upholstery: emerald green leather and ruby-red velvet. Nor do they capture the sumptuous range of materials: onyx, pearwood, handwoven wool, chromed metal and (surprisingly) a linoleum floor. Since the surviving photographs do not show any human figures, they heighten the impression that the house was built yesterday, especially as the furniture, designed by the architect, is still in production.
Mies van der Rohe appears in a photograph taken in 1926. The place is Stuttgart, the site of the famous Weissenhof housing exhibition, which he planned, and where he brought together the leading exponents of the soon-to-be-christened International Style. One of these was Le Corbusier, who is also in the photograph. The two firebrands, who will soon set the architectural world on its ear, are deep in conversation. Le Corbusier smokes a pipe and sports a jaunty derby and a loose, short tweed coat. Mies, looking older than his forty years, wears a Homburg, a long dark ulster, and spats. This photograph puts the Tugendhat House in context. However “modern” the airy room appears to my eyes, it contained a considered and formal way of life that is as remote from me as waxed moustaches, Homburgs, and spats. It is in that context that Mies’ curious combination of ordered simplicity and sybaritic luxury must be understood.
Nothing could be less similar to the Tugendhat House than Charles Moore’s weekend house that he built for himself in the hills above Berkeley, California. I saw it in the summer of 1964, two years after it was built. While the Tugendhat House appears sexy and glamorous, the Moore house is at first glance downright rustic, a little barn, twenty-six feet square, capped by a saddle roof. It is an elegant little barn, however, with white-painted walls and large windows that open up the corners, not by disappearing into the ground but by sliding sideways like barn doors. The one-room interior contains a grand piano and a sunken bath that looks vaguely Roman, perhaps because the skylight above it is supported by four solid fir Tuscan columns (found by Moore at a demolition site). Four similar columns support a second skylight over a sitting area.
I admire the Tugendhat House, but I could not imagine living in it. That is, I could not imagine having to dress up sufficiently to feel at home. The Moore house, on the other hand, reflects a more compliant sensibility. Its floor-to-ceiling windows, spare detailing, and open interior mark it as a successor to the International Style. Yet the shingled roof and the Tuscan columns hearken back to older traditions. The little building manages to be comfortable, relaxed, archetypal, and vaguely ironic, all at the same time. The eclectic, Californian setting is both informal and formal. Put another way, it is a place where people who wear tweed jackets with jeans, or silk skirts with canvas espadrilles would fit right in.
The little Moore barn is an historic building. Together with Robert Venturi’s Vanna Venturi House, which was designed the same year, it marks the advent of an architectural style that became known as Postmodernism.5 One of the celebrated buildings of Postmodernism is James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, which was completed in 1984. Stirling vastly expands Moore’s eclecticism, combining a bewildering mixture of forms; a Doric portico, a staid neoclassical wing that matches the existing museum, an Egyptian-looking curved cornice, a colorful Russian Constructivist entrance canopy, a curving steel-and-glass wall, and two huge blue ventilator funnels lifted straight from the Centre Georges Pompidou. The monumental façade of alternating bands of travertine and sandstone is undermined by oversized fiberglass handrails that look like pink sausages. I couldn’t understand this design, except as a tour-de-force, until I visited the building. It was a wintry Sunday, and the Staatsgalerie was packed—it is one of the most popular museums in Germany. Now the architecture made sense. This museum-cum-discotheque was the perfect setting for the eclectic crowd. We were wearing every type of dress imaginable: casual wear, business suits, ski parkas, work clothes. Some people dressed up for a Sunday visit to the museum, some dressed down. Stirling’s lively collage absorbed us all. I did not see any gentlemen in Homburgs and spats, but they would have fitted in, too.
A number of years ago I accompanied the architect Jack Diamond on a visit to a building that he had just completed at York University in Toronto. It was a student center, containing a food court and lounges on the main level and student organization offices on the second floor. The exterior of the building was decidedly traditional. Facing a landscaped common, the well-proportioned façade consisted of a colonnaded brick base supporting a row of double columns capped by a deep copper-lined cornice. Behind the colonnade, which was fitted with retractable glass panels that could be opened during warm weather, was a two-story-high hall lit by three large skylights. The exterior had a simplicity that reminded me of McKim, Mead & White, albeit without Classical ornament.
The interior was different, with many hallmarks of the International Style: no decoration, bare concrete, exposed structural beams, factory sash glazing and steel pipe railings. I assumed that the stark simplicity was the result of a restricted budget, and a desire to use materials that would withstand wear and tear. It seemed pretty banal to me, and although I didn’t say anything to Jack, I was disappointed. Yet as we walked around, I changed my mind. Although the décor was tough and unsentimental, it was not crude. There were sleek stainless-steel pendant lighting fixtures with suspended glass diffusers and stylish easy chairs covered in canvas. In the food court, the bar and counter tops were marble, the dining tables solid maple. Students were gathered around tables, lounging on the staircase, sprawled on the floor. The atmosphere was hard to pin down. This was not the precious, corporate modernism of Richard Meier, nor the contrived, technological wizardry of Norman Foster. It was certainly not the Calvinist minimalism that I associated with many trendy younger architects. I couldn’t put my finger on it until I realized that the functional but chic décor reminded me of the no-nonsense styling of a Benetton clothing store.
I happen to like Collegiate Gothic buildings. I like their dark rooms with wood paneling, hammer-beam ceilings, and traditional oak furniture. But seeing the York student center made me realize that whenever I walk through these old buildings I also experience a nagging dissatisfaction. It has to do with the students. The young men and women in baseball caps, shorts, stenciled sweat shirts, and iridescent nylon windbreakers just don’t fit in. They should be wearing boaters and blazers, tweeds and flannels. Of course, no student that I have ever seen—including at Oxford—dresses that way. I may deplore the loss of decorum, but as an architect I can’t do anything to change it. It is the building that must do the accommodating.
If the relationship between dress and décor is intimate, it is also one-sided. Interior decorators and architects will bridle at this, but there is no doubt that dress comes first. “People have always worn what they wanted to wear,” writes Anne Hollander, “fashion exists to keep fulfilling that desire.”6 And architecture must follow. For the truth is that a building—no matter how useful or well built or beautiful—that is not sympathetic to the way that people dress risks looking not merely anachronistic, but downright silly. Like it or not, architecture cannot escape fashion.