The Wright Stuff (and some other stuff)

1990 has been an epiphanous year for me architecturally, full of good looking and good booking. It began in January in euphoric frustration at the Phoenix Art Museum, where the Taliesin Foundation was finally getting off its Olympian duff with a show of Frank Lloyd Wright’s drawings. (For your favorite Frank, you can buy the Abrams catalog by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer for $65 at the AIA Book Store, 17th and Sansom.)
I say “euphoric” because nothing Wright did, no matter how wrong and self-Wrighteous he might be, is uninteresting. A frustrating aspect of this flawed genius was the large number of the drawings that were pipe dreams; “project” was stamped all over the place.

This reminded me of Lewis Mumford’s improvised U Penn obituary the day Wright died—he never grew up, never learned how to give and take with others. Maybe you should take Borders Bookstore’s Chip Sheffield’s advice: Buy a golden oldie—Edgar Kauffman’s Valentine to my favorite place in America, Falling Water.

My biggest epiphany of the year was in Paris at the Museum of Decorative Arts at the 70th birthday festschrift show for the Brazilian folk architect, Jose Caldas Zanine. Maybe his humble happy beginnings in Recife kept him from having his ego deformed like Wright.

He began as a model maker for the Oscar Niemeyer crew designing the new capital city of Brasilia. Gradually, he weaned himself from their Bauhaus concrete obsession, committing himself to furniture in wood and finally to architecture of a surpassing power. When he led me through the show, he sneered at his first pre-wood work. “I had to regress back to the mother wood,” he smiled cherubically.

Zanine, "Feeling and Doing" (MAD, 16 Rue Rivoli, Paris, 300 French Francs, or Free Library of Philadelphia) is easily the best architecture book of the year if your criterion is a sustainable architecture. Quite apart from the intrinsic glory of his creations, what made me finally bend a knee is his prototypes for workers’ houses, made out of debris of sawmills and mining operations. Z is the Mother Teresa of architecture.

Another major surge of architectural pleasure was greeting me in D.C. in February when the AIA awarded its Gold Medal to E. Fay Jones of Fayetteville, Arkansas. E. Fay who? I asked myself.

You can begin to relieve your ignorance in Edward Norman’s The House of God: Church Architecture, Styles and History (Thames and Hudson, $60), where Jones’ Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, is described sweetly as “no more than a covered lattice of wood and steel, the interstices filled with glass,” a nondenominational chapel for meditation and pilgrimage.

Norman deals with all the periods in our churchly history but comes to an edifying climax in the modern with the new chestnuts of Ronchamps, La Sagrada Familia, and Breuer’s Collegeville Abbey receiving their due. The text is literate and illuminating: I never noticed that the style was big for houses, theaters and dance halls but little in the ecclesiastical department. (Maybe Norman will wonder in an inevitable second edition why Father Coughlin went Deco in his Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan.)

Jean Favier’s The World of Chartres (Abrams, $60) gave me some fine rushes of recollection. The first time I visited Chartres in December 1967, Andre Malraux’s spotlights gave a predawn reading of the portal sculptures an unforgettable access. Later, inside, the radiators induced a kind of shimmering effect on the stained glass. On my last visit there, I was astonished to learn in a Rev BiCen visual essay in the crypt that Jacobins plotted to tear down the noble pile because its dominating the landscape of the village was a bad example. A canny architect dissuaded them at the last minute by pointing out that there would be no place to put the rubble. A sure-fire goodie, this one.

If you’re really in a generous mood this Christmas, send me Marika Hausen et al., eds., Eliel Saarinen, 1896-1923 (MIT Press, $125), a scholarly tome out of the stupendous Museum of Finnish Architecture in Helsinki. I grew up in Detroit, and my first awareness of architecture as something more than getting out of the rain was ES’s complex at Cranbrook. Like your first girlfriend, your first architect is something special.

I remember my glee in Tampere in 1985 when I asked the manager of a Saarinen bank if he had a brochure on it. “No, but if you come back in an hour I’ll call Helsinki to get permission to show you The Room.” The Room was the board’s meeting chamber, a fabulous exercise in Jugendstil totality: table, chairs, chandelier, fireplace, everything in tune with the other parts. This is a book to plan trips to Finland with.

If you have a friend, relative or lover whose architectural ignorance is putting you off, put him / her up to Jim Kemp’s American Vernacular: Regional Influences in Architecture and Design (AIA Press, paper, $24.95). It walks away from the seminal John A. Kouwenhoven concept of “vernacular” (clipper ships, axe handles, bridges) in favor of “regional architectural styles and house-types.”

Once you understand that cheeky pre-emption, you’re ready for a clear, comprehensive and often eloquent explication of the Queen of the Arts at home, where architecture hits us in our bodies, minds and wallets. Kemp’s book shows how indigenous elements like siting, climate, materials, color and shapes work across a portfolio of regional styles: New England, Mid-Atlantic, the South, the Southwest, the Midwest, the West and the National Styles. The color photos are uniformly superb. I would say this is a Best Buy of the season.

And I know it’s churlish of me to be a Scrooge, but I must assign a Worst Buy, which goes to Albrecht Bangert and Karl Michael Armer’s 80s Style: Designs of the Decade (Abbeville, $29.95). Last February, I took a detour to Amsterdam to see if I was being fair to Memphis (the furniture, not the city, which I love). Ugh. I used to just hate it; seeing a museum full of it, I now despise it.

And I think I understand why: Bad ideas drive out good furnishings. The editors called upon Ettore Sottsass, the Pope of Packaged Piffle, to bless their recycling of Abbeville’s design annuals: “Certainly, were we to review the multifarious trends that influenced styles and beliefs in the 1980s—punk, high-tech, low-tech, post-modernism, minimalism, deconstructivism, and their various historical variants…they all seem to share (a) high degree of irrationality, almost of bizarreness, and the fact that even in their contradictions they were willfully extreme.”

Well, in all their deviously hysterical deviancies, I think they stink. If funky artists want to sell such high-IQ trash to an uncultivated class of nouveaux riches herdsters, OK. But let them leave our industrial production system to the FROG designers whose inductive iron and ironing board (page 210) is the kind of rational marvel missing in this chrestomathy of the mawkish. Merry Christmas, Sottsass!

Wendy Peterson at the AIA Bookstore gave a big boost to Edward R. Ford’s The Details of Modern Architecture (M.I.T., $55) for the skill with which he shows, with original drawings, how the construction of well-known buildings actually works.

“New York” architect-writer Carter Wiseman has done a solid job on the career of I.M. Pei (Abrams, $49.50), from Denver’s Mile-High Center in the 1950s to his greatest (to my, at first skeptical, eye) entrance to the Louvre.

Fulvio Irace’s Emerging Skylines: The New American Skyscrapers (Whitney, $50) does a page or two gloss on the biggies, including Helmut Jahn’s Liberty Place, which he describes as the “Trojan Horse of a radical new direction in urban policy on the part of the city government.”

If you end up too short of cash for the Big Books, don’t lose heart: AIA has a neat “The Houses of Fairmount Park” 1991 calendar fro $9.95, with a slightly out of date (if apt) 1889 epigraph from Lafcadio Hearn: “Is it possible you have never seen Fairmount Park? Believe me then that it is the most beautiful place of the whole civilized world.” Hear that, Tom Muldoon?

Or there’s the Frank Lloyd Wright Address Book for $16.50. Look at the work of the great architects. Read about their achievements. Love them. Don’t’ abandon them to the marketplace.

From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, December 12, 1990