ArchNewsNow.com

 

Home    Site Search   Contact Us     Subscribe


 

 

Book Review: Talkin' 'Bout (Not) My Generation: Uplifting Gen X Architects Showcase Pragmatic Optimism

In "New York Dozen: Gen X Architects" by architect Michael J. Crosbie, the framing of each architectural firm is extraordinary.

By Norman Weinstein
July 29, 2011


One of the most questionable ways, to me, of offering a swatch of lively architects in print is to group them by age. As expected in our youth-oriented marketplace, this orientation spawns books with titles like 40 Under 40: Young Architects for the New Millennium and websites and magazines filled with photo portraits of fresh-faced newcomers. Blame my venerable age on this complaint, but shouldn’t architectural surveys proliferate in the age range from 70 on?

 

Now that this blast of old-fogeyism is through, I can sing some praises for a very useful new book, New York Dozen: Gen X Architects (Images Publishing Group), by architect Michael J. Crosbie. Once you get past the Gen X limitation, and Crosbie’s equally questionable framing of this text as a supposed “answer” to the controversial “New York Five “ (Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Richard Meier, Michael Graves, and Charles Gwathmey), there are fine descriptions of exciting projects. These young architects don’t erase or build upon the 1960s-70s designs of the New York Five as much as bypass the heavily theoretical foundations of that older generation in favor of what editor Kristen Richards lucidly pinpoints in her enthusiastic introduction as creative designs emanating “pragmatic optimism.”

 

This book’s framing of each architectural firm is extraordinary. Each firm gives their architectural values in a dozen words, their architectural philosophy in three-dozen words, the rationale for why they practice in two-dozen words, and an overview of their practice in twenty-dozen words. A better preface for examining their plans and photographs of completed projects couldn’t be imaged. Another strong plus is the inclusion of the designers beyond the Dozen’s own offices who are frequent collaborators – an ideal counterpoint to the typical glossy architectural magazine hosanna for a starchitect working in lofty isolation.

 

Although these dozen practices are clearly nested in New York and do the majority of their work in its boroughs, two extraordinary masterpieces are situated worlds away from the Big Apple. A spectacular pavilion for the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, designed by Della Valle Bernheimer, daringly uses abstract butterfly patterns cut into steel plates to create an architecture reflecting a butterfly’s metamorphosis. [Editor’s note: partners Andrew Bernheimer and Jared Della Valle now practice separately – but collaboratively – as Bernheimer Architecture headed by Bernheimer, and Alloy LLC, a real estate development and consulting firm headed by Della Valle.] And Dune Terrence, a combination temporary gallery, convention center, and sculpture garden designed by nARCHITECTS, reveals an uncanny ability to plan for a site a stone’s throw away from the great pyramids in Giza, Egypt. It’s refreshing to see U.S. architects of any age possess the sophisticated vision to create a design for the Middle East showing extreme geo-cultural sensitivity, an awareness of Arab vernacular architecture, and the neglected Islamic Modernism of Hassan Fathy.

 

Every project is infused with sustainable awareness, simply another 21st-century way to express pragmatism. No project looks like it was designed to prove a profound Post-modern theory or to project a blimp-sized ego upon the earth. Even better, these young architects possess a graceful sense of modest scale, a fetchingly colorful and sensual humanism that can be interpreted as the essence of an optimistic architect’s spirit.

 

Who knows what will become of them? Some of their naiveté about the business side of architecture will surely dissipate. Taryn Christoff and Martin Finio of Christoff:Finio Architecture may rue the day that they wrote “Architecture is less a product than a process,” not because it isn’t true, but because it doesn’t attract clients who struggle to pay only for architectural products. But in a down market, enough good things can’t be said about young architects embodying pragmatic optimism. In fact, that holds for any economic climate. When isn’t architecture the practice of practically designing hope?

 

The New York Dozen: Arts Corporation; Architecture in Formation; Andre Kikoski Architect; Christoff:Finio Architecture; Della Valle Bernheimer; Leven Betts; Leroy Street Studio; MOS; nARCHITECTS studio; SUMO; WORK Architecture Company (WORKac); WXY Architecture

 

 

Norman Weinstein writes about architecture and design for Architectural Record, and is the author of “Words That Build” – an exclusive 21-part series published by ArchNewsNow.com – that focuses on the overlooked foundations of architecture: oral and written communication. He consults with architects and engineers interested in communicating more profitably; his webinars are available from ExecSense. He can be reached at nweinstein@q.com.

 

More by Weinstein:

 

A Meditation on the Beauty of Zaha Hadid's Door Handle

Hadid's design issues a challenge: define beauty by lyrically playing with illusion.

 

Why "Greatest Hits" Lists by Architecture's Stars Should Be Mocked
Transferring the musical or cinematic "greatest hits" list mind-set to architecture is deleterious, and here's why.

 

Celebratory Meditations on SANAA Winning the Pritzker Prize

 

Op-Ed: Life After Ada: Reassessing the Utility of Architectural Criticism 
Ada Louise Huxtable deserves mucho thanks and praise - but other questions moving us to a new flavor of criticism have to be asked.

 

"Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum": Bravura Example of an Architectural Documentary - Wright's Guggenheim Done Right
A look at great architecture as the product of the dance of the designer's intellect in an architectural film that doesn't miss a beat.

 

Book Review: A Shout Out for Leers Weinzapfel Associates: "Made to Measure" - Some Meditations on Rejuvenating Campus Architecture

 

Book Review: Diving into Architecture from Every New Angle: Reading Guillevic's "Geometries"
Why an obscure book of French poetry in a flashy translation goes to the heart of every architectural practice.

 

Book Review: "Immaterial World: Transparency in Architecture": Marc Kristal crystallizes increasingly complex notions of transparency with a light touch.
Although most of the 25 projects discussed are well-known, they take on additional meaning in this sensitively curated selection. 

 

Book Review: "Visual Planning and the Picuresque" by Nikolaus Pevsner. Edited by Mathew Aitchison
A rediscovered manuscript unveils a portrait of the famed architectural historian as neglected urban designer. His commitment to the picturesque aesthetic for buildings and towns is as urgently needed as ever.

 

Book Review: How New Urbanism's Case Triumphs Best Through "The Language of Towns & Cities: A Visual Dictionary" by Dhiru A. Thadani
Thadani's oversized reference charms, infuriates, and enlightens.

 

Best Architecture Books of 2010
Ten books pointing the way to larger professional horizons

 

Book Review: "Architecture and Beauty: Conversations with Architects about a Troubled Relationship": Yael Reisner exuberantly interviews architects about beauty
Any of you architects seen Mr. Keats Lately?

 

Book Review: Shedding Light on Concrete: Tadao Ando: Complete Works 1975-2010 by Philip Jodidio
Photographic presentation of a poet of light and concrete triumphs over lackluster commentary.

 

Book Review: Sage Architectural Reflections from Architecture's "Athena": Denise Scott Brown's "Having Words" distills a lifetime of theorizing and practice into practical and succinct guidance for thriving through difficult times
Brown's occasional papers trace a trenchant trajectory of learning from Las Vegas to learning from everything.

 

Book Review: Keeping the Architectural Profession Professional: "Architecture from the Outside In: Selected Essays by Robert Gutman" celebrates Gutman's legacy as invaluable outsider
Selected essays by a penetrating sociologist of architecture pose the kinds of tough-minded questions needed now to keep architectural professional on-track.

 

Book Review: "Design through Dialogue: A Guide for Clients and Architects," by Karen A. Franck and Teresa von Sommaruga Howard
A helpful communications primer offers case studies of winning collaborations between clients and architects, but as useful as this book proves, it leaves some uncomfortable questions about communication unaddressed.

 

Twilight Visions: Vintage Surrealist Photography Sheds New Light on Architecture 
An exhibition and book of photographs of Paris between the wars might just be the necessary correctives to the virtual sterility of digital imagery

 

Best Architecture Books of 2009 
10 crucial volumes from the classic to the iconoclastic

 

Book Review: "Gunnar Birkerts: Metaphoric Modernist" by Sven Birkerts and Martin Schwartz

A major architect in the history of Modernism finally receives recognition – and sundry asides about why Modernism never exited.

 

Book Review: "Urban Design for an Urban Century: Placemaking for People," by Lance Jay Brown, David Dixon, and Oliver Gillham 
To the credit of the erudite authors, their sketch of urban design brings levels of political, sociological, and architectural analysis together in a readable synthesis.

 

Book Review: "Everything Must Move: 15 Years at Rice School of Architecture 1994-2009" 
There’s a Texas flood of architectural ideas that gives ample evidence of an architecture school that unsettles pat assumptions. Who could ask for anything more?

 

Book Review: A Subversive Book Every Architect Needs: "Architect's Essentials of Negotiation" by Ava J. Abramowitz 
Supposedly architects don't need negotiating skills along with other communication skills because great design "sells itself." How lovely that an AIA legal counsel created this definitive book to shatter that thin myth.

 

Book Review: A Perspective from One Elevation: "Conversations With Frank Gehry" by Barbara Isenberg

Gehry's conversations offer portraits of an astute listener as well as talker, an architect as aware of his flaws and limitations as of his virtues.

 

Best Architecture Books of 2008 
10 tomes from the superior to the indispensable

 

Book Review: You've Got to Draw the Line Somewhere

A review of Drafting Culture: a Social History of Architectural Graphic Standards by George Barnett Johnston

 

Book Review: "NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith," edited by Franklin Sirmans

Sharpen your pencils - and get ready to do a NeoHooDoo shimmy.

 



(click on pictures to enlarge)