Architecture begins its road home

The December issue of Esquire magazine contains its yearly “Best and Brightest” feature, including a profile of the architect who designed the new Seattle Central Library, Joshua Prince-Ramus.

Not having any formal background in architecture, I usually roll my eyes when a media piece sings some starchitect’s praises to the heavens. Architects design buildings so they don’t fall down, and they enable an engineer to lead a team of builders. However, press coverage about a celebrity architect seems like any other form of celebrity worship, existing mostly to sell more magazines or TV ad time.

Starchitects design buildings as works of art more than functional objects. As a result, most starchitects’ buildings suffer from the flaws we know well: anti-urban, repetitive buildings set back too far from the sidewalk. Not Prince-Ramus. He sees architecture’s mission as solving a problem, rather than personal expression. Prince-Ramus feels that the focus on personal artistic expression over practical problem solving has hurt the architectural profession. “No wonder architecture’s dead,” he said.

Mr. Prince-Ramus told Esquire:

Starting in the 1920s, the modernist agenda made a schism between form and function. Terrible idea—terrible for architecture. They sided with functionalism; they failed. Architects in their infinite wisdom didn’t stitch them back together; we went all the way the other way, to formalism. And now we’re at the height of the formalist agenda – total failure, terrible idea.

While the Esquire piece is not available online, both core.form-ula.com and ted.com have excellent pieces about Prince-Ramus.

According to the ted.com article, “[Prince-Ramus] flatly rejects not just the title, but the entire notion of a ‘starchitect’ designing with a genius stroke of the pen.” In the core.form-ula.com article, he says:

We advance new strategies for flexibility. Despite an increased need to accommodate change, contemporary design still relies on an antiquated version of flexibility: one size fits all. The promise of a blank slate upon which any activity can occur has produced sterile, unresponsive architecture.

The wind-swept plazas and repetitive forms found in many modernist buildings are indeed sterile and unresponsive. Human settlements are alive, ever-changing, dynamic things. Architecture as an intellectual field has ignored this truth. By focusing on work done by starchitects, it became more and more about pleasing other architects rather than solving the practical problem of designing a building that stands up, is efficient, cost-effective, and functions for those who use it in context with its surroundings.

The architectural field became increasingly focused on its own concepts and studies while it ignored the problems of designing real, practical buildings. The buildings that received all the coverage were ones that were designed to be like the pyramids in ancient Egypt: an eternal, unchanging shrine designed to commemorate one individual’s greatness for all time. That attitude is about as anti-urban as you can get.

Mr. Prince-Ramus continued in the Esquire article:

All the great architects—every one of them—says ‘It represents…’ I say to students, ‘Don’t you think it would be great if architecture started doing again? Why are we representing? Do—it’s much more powerful. I’ve never seen a client give a s**t about my personal vision. I had to figure out how to piggyback what my vision was on their issues.

Architecture has always had a lot to offer civilization. I hope that Mr. Prince-Ramus views represent the next big steps in the field. Practicality, and solving a problem, are far more beneficial things to the world than impractical multimillion dollar works of art that also kill the urban fabric.