Architecture
Buildings and structures
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The time has come to kill architectural modernism. While the ideas that underlay the movement produced some fine buildings (though admittedly none that come to mind) the dictum of Adolf Loos in his essay “Ornament and Crime” that avoidance of ornament was “a sign of spiritual strength” could not be more wrong. Loos likely was…
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I want to submit that the solution to all modern life is found in that oldest of city structures–the piazza. Though we tend to think of the piazza as purely Italian, in fact the French “Place” and the English square have much the same virtue. All are public gathering places.
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Frank Gehry, the Canadian-born American architect, who’s now become a household name in sophisticated circles, has a great piece in The Atlantic about architecture and cities. Gehry points out that though most Americans (and Canadians) live in sterile box-like houses in the suburbs or glass curtain-wall towers in downtown cities, they nonetheless make pilgrimages to…
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Will Alsop, a British architect, is the crazy mind behind the Sharp Centre for Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design. When I first moved to Toronto, it was one of the few buildings I saw that provoked any excitement, that provided any kind of challenge to Toronto’s bland architectural sensibilities. Now Paul…
Charles Durning Carroll 