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Oh my, Thayer. It's difficult to argue with you when you express such hostility to my profession. I'd like to know more about your opinions before I respond.

Have you ever been in an architecture program, post-grad even? My perception from older associates is that they talked a lot about beauty until Modernism failed and Peter Eisenman showed up. Where did I say that beauty is irrelevant? I just said you had to have some kind of underpinning with intellectual rigor.

Philosophy majors still study Socrates, and he was pretty wrong. Who says that spending a good amount of time discussing someone who affected theory as much as him is a bad thing? It also assumes that every thing he said and did is wrong, which is far from the truth. On that note, who wrote the phrase "A house is a Machine for living in," and what exactly did he mean? If you answer the second part you might understand where the human fits in. Can you show me intent on the behalf of the 'Busier to hate humanity? I'm sure you can't objectively antihuman sentiment in Gropius or Scharoun.

You assume that people lose their ideas when they face real world challenges and criticism. They simply augment them and modify them with humanistic detail if that was missing before. Not everything in their designs were wrong, and in the face of practice they have to create realistic applications. The only thing that disheartens people is the cost of building anything interesting. My friend who went to Notre Dame was so disheartened at the probable costs of her traditionalist buildings that she quit and now works for a developer. Is that because her classes didn't teach her useful techniques?

The same is true about the first generation modernists. Have you ever compared the built work of the Mies to his writings? All architects develop over time.

I am having a hard time telling if I am not being clear or whether you are misconstruing my arguments. The ego-investment argument is usually not something I hear about architects, and I'm not going to touch it because it is not something I can know. How can you read their minds with such certainty. I do like your literary flourish at the end though.

by The King of Spain on Nov 25, 2008 12:11 am • link • report