Patinaphobia as a Systemic Flaw in Modernoid Architecture

A disconcerting phenomenon in Modernoid Architecture is its failure to achieve Patina. Older classic buildings like the medievally created Cathedrals get finer with age. Many Modernoid structures never achieve Patina: more characteristically they self degrade rapidly, often collapsing visually. Let me give as a revealing example, Richard Meier’s Museum of Applied Art (1985) in Frankfurt am Main in Germany. I cite it because I have closely observed its rapid degeneration over the past thirteen years.

In his Auftakt Rede Mr. Meier thanked the Burgers of Frankfurt for giving this commission to him a Jew, a contemptible instance of Holocaust Hustling! He asserts as well that his new structure is a homage to the “Jugendstil” villa that was the original museum building for Frankfurt’s astonishing Museum Mile on the bank of the Main river, the so-called Schaumainkai Avenue.

This falsity reveals an astonishing architectural illiteracy for one of America’s first Pritzker laureates. That villa is a purely Grunderzeit structure, and a feeble instance of such in any case, without the tiniest smidgin of Jugendstilia. Then Meier asserted that his MAK structure was an innovative, idiosyncratic solution to art display. Alas it is rather feeble replica of his High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia—down to replicating in Frankfurt the dysfunctional ramps he pioneered in that Southern U.S. metropolis.

I first visited MAK in April, 1985, shortly after it opened. I was puzzled by the sight of workmen affixing white sheets to the windows facing the Main river. My PR guide explained that Meier had been thoughtlessly dazzled by the efflorescence of high rise skyscrapers there in the so-called Manhattanization of Frankfurt’s. Meier had over-fenestrated to captivate museum visitors beholding that site! It was only April, but the building could not not carry its heat load!

As an art critic I was dismayed by how this fenestral fiddling had wrecked the interior lighting: Here puddles of darkness, there, blazes of too much light! Indeed, when the architectural blipopcracy of the City of Frankfurt offered the adjacent Museum of World Cultures a Meier, they responded,”Thanks, but No Thanks!” They preferred to redo their three villas. When I asked Mr. Meier about the truth of these rumors at the opening of The New Getty in L.A., he abruptly concluded our interview, and strided off in a huff!

Sunday, April 12, 2008, I visited the revolutionary Russian Porcelain exhibition at MAK as an element in my spring round-up review, “Frankfurt’s Fruhling Kunstfest”. The show itself was innovative and instructive, but I was visually appalled, entering and leaving that complex. Walls were covered with lesions of scrofulous patches. Jointures were especially vulnerable to lesions.

If the Original Sin of Modernoid Architecture was the gratuitous obliteration of the gable, returning vulnerability to snow, rain, and pathologically leaking roofs, then the second weakness was technological hubris, the uncritical employment of newly accessible materials like glass, steel and cement. No one denies that grand, even great, buildings can of course use new materials. Rather, innovation for its own sake defies the prudence and historically derived expertise of tradition.

“Signature “ architects like Meier are especially vulnerable to the hubris of techno abuse. His dazzlingly white surfaces (I mock him by calling his shtick MEN’S URINAL MODERN) much too easily succumb to the slings and harrows of outrageous defects. Indeed, the Brentwood zillionaires residing between the Getty site and their delightfully dazzling Pacific Ocean sunsets were so fearful that the reflective excess of Meier’s enameled white metallic surfaces would annihilate their “natural” sunset pleasures that they used their clout to veto Standard Meier Shtick. That is why the Getty’s external cladding is Travertine.

Alas, Travertine can also be a bad choice. Alvar Aalto, in love with Tuscany, clad his majestic Finlandia Hall in Helsinki in Travertine. But that material is very vulnerable to Finnish winters! The porosity of that material means water can invade weaker surfaces. Freezing then causes chards to break off and hit Tourists: Can’t have that!

The Aalto epigraph for his centennial exhibition reads NEVER FORGET: ARCHITECTS MAKE MISTAKES!! The great Finn thereby initiates a profoundly significant and badly needed sense of criticizing architects immunity from criticism.