Huxtable's Humane Hustle

For going on a century, Ada Louise Huxtable (nee Nachmann) has been savouring the Beaux Arts pleasures of growing up well tutored (father, novelist; uncle, rabbi) in Central Park West New York. And now she has an omnium gatherum to attest to this mainly self-education, On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change, Walker and Company, 2008, $35.00.) Her tenth volume! New York pundit Paul Goldberger, none the less, with friendly hyperbole, exaggerates her role in the emergence of architectural journalism in America: "Before Ada Louise Huxtable,” he strains, "architecture was not part of public dialog. Today it is, and she is overwhelmingly responsible for this.” (Book cover blurb.)

Surely this demeans the de facto creation of architectural media by Peter Blake, whose Aryanized nom de plume obscures his flight from Nazi Germany and real architectural training as an American refugee. And I was amused to learn that she got her first New York Times assignment when her “predecessor” Aline Loucheimhad the good luck to marry Eero Saarinen.

Indeed, there is a happily amateurish aspect to her commentary as when she thrilled at the experience of overnighting at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water. My experience there was 180 degrees different. I had driven overnight on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in my new Honda, planning to “storm” my favorite architectural achievement en route to the AIA annual convention in Cincinnati. At breakfast outside Bear Run, I scanned the Sunday Post-Gazette for what might be happening in Pittsburgh since I planned to park my car there and Greyhound overnight to Cincy, where I had a long delayed liaison with their Art Deco gem at Union Station.

To my astonished delight, Carnegie Mellon was staging a major retrospective of my favorite twentieth century artist, Sonia Delaunay! What a day it would. I was met at the door of Falling Water by a loving couple training in Chicago with no less my friend and tutor than their current boss Bertrand Goldberg, the most prestigious architect to have studied at the Bauhaus, in Mies’ last class. I loved their buzz about their boss. But I was there to honor someone greater!

My first surprise was that I, no giant at 5’ 8”, had to stoop to enter the door frames without clunking my skull. That sly squirt, I exclaimed silently. The man who wore high heels and a pork pie hat to dissimulate his lack of stature, had made his dinky self the module! There was more entertainment ahead. The man who claimed the hearth must be the heart of a home made made his so limited that it couldn’t heat a meal hot enough to eat! Not to worry: the crane to bring the great crock pot over the fire couldn’t swing it. I call it now his Crackpot. Heh, nobody’s perfect!

But I remembered then Edgar Kaufmann’s enjoinder that he have his engineers check out the math of his glorious looking cantilevers. And Wright’s outrage that his genius be questioned. Alas, it turned out decades later that Falling Water was falling into the local waters! And that as a Pennsylvania taxpayer, I resented the gratuitous, if much delayed, vindication of Kauffmann's prescient judgment! Ada said nothing about this. She just thrilled at her snoozing among the stars.

This reminded me of the unacknowledged scandal of the Icons of Modernism. Falling Water (1935) is no longer habitable. It’s a Visitors Center. Corbu’s suite at Weissenhof (1927) has recently been designated a VC! Mies’ “Farnsworth House” (1950) has just been declared a VC! Dedicated to his genius as a designer. Come on! Why all these salutes to Failure? I’m reminded of Mies’s sneering at Philip C. Johnson’s “Glass House” as looking like a “hot dog stand at night”!

Similarly, I was surprised that Ada aspired to evaluate Alvar Aalto’s Finlandia from mere pictures. (She convincingly attested to the stateside Aalto’s she had relished for credible rationales. But there I was in Helsinki, on a pious odyssey honoring the centennial of his birth, dismayed on a Sunday morning constitutional, that all the travertine cladding had been removed because that stone couldn’t take Finnish winters and dangerous shards had been falling on tourists. (CAN’T HAVE THAT!) It was a sentimental centennial time and the Finns faced a choice: granite, which was winter worthy, or thicker travertine with better adhesive even though this ”solution” would only last a few years. The Finns weren’t taking it for granite.

After breakfast, I hiked to the Finnish Architecture Museum, where a centennial tribute had just opened! Its epigraph was pure AA: “Never forget, architects can make mistakes.” As much as I enjoy ALH, I find her much too credulous with her Icons. It’s the corrigible humanness of AA that most appeals to me.