In or not in the vernacular

The Holl additions in Kansas also raise an important issue which is not discussed enough in a climate of "Starchitecture": how new buildings can feed into the "vernacular".

My sense is that any building as intellectually rarefied, and aloof from practical building considerations, as the Nelson-Atkins additions can have little to say to local building culture. Most critics agree that Holl has succeeded here in bleeding out the unwelcome physicality from his building (in the early twenty-first century we regard brick and stone buildings with as much distaste as high-fat meals) to leave behind only those twentieth century nostrums: "space and light" (see, for example, Cathleen McGuigan's piece in Newsweek). The vast majority (eg. Blair Kamin in The Chicago Tribune) luxuriate in its liminality: the magic revealed when it is poised, at dusk, between light and dark. So what is there for the local vernacular to feast on?

Kamin insists that Nelson-Atkins is "important for the broader direction it suggests". But suggests to whom? Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post is of the opinion that Holl's achievement is not easily repeatable, comparing it to something like Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim, which he feels is repeatable. This is plausible, given that the origins of the mature Gehry style lie in what Hal Foster characterised as "a funky LA vernacular" of "cheap materials associated with commercial building - exposed plywood, corrugated metal siding and chain-link fencing."

Heaven and Holl

We are clearly at some kind of tipping point. The simultaneous launch of Stephen Holl's Nelson-Atkins expansion in Kansas City, and Daniel Libeskind's "crystal" centrepiece to the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), has given critics ample opportunity to reflect on the age of the icon being dead -- or, at least, the kind of icon ROM represents, as there is something of the icon about Holl's structures too.

The virtual unanimity of praise heaped on Nelson-Atkins by the critics has revealed another kind of unanimity, in critics' reactions to the original 1933 museum which Holl has extended. More than one critic calls it a "temple of art"; it is by turns "austere", "distant and unapproachable", "sacred and inviolate"; a "folly" with "high-minded language about art and humanity carved into its stone walls", and with a metaphorical "do not touch sign" placed upon it by the trustees. And it's not only the trustees who have put up such a sign: not one critic can contemplate an extension to the building that might have adopted the same classical, disciplined, bounded language as was used back then. Paul Goldberger in The New York Times opines that Holl's free-form, half-submerged glass lanterns which spill down the east side of the museum is a finer homage than copying could ever have been, bestowing "a kind of perpetual gravitas" on the older building.

Stuff like this is so contradictory. If the building is so goddam "austere" and "high-minded" why should the architect be praised for accentuating these qualities? And if its "gravitas" really does deserve being preserved in perpetuity why shouldn't a new extension seek a similar gravitas, using similar means, rather than slipping and sliding to avoid direct engagement?

What If de Monchaux is Bad for Design?

I have been perplexed by Winterhouse Award-winner Thomas de Monchaux's recent take on Apple: "What If Apple is Bad for Design?". In this piece he seems to argue that the use of "default" solutions to problems, though appropriate for software design, is a "curse" when applied to hardware. This argument seems to be taking us back to the mid-C20, if not earlier, when designers felt obliged to rethink every problem from the ground up, without recourse to ready-made templates or "patterns".



The "signature building" is a survivor of this, on the whole meretricious, idea; and these don't come much more influential than Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim. But there is a growing body of critics out to locate the anti-Bilbao, even in that most 'nineties and 'noughties of building types: the museum extension. That's why some (generally non-Spanish) critics have fallen upon Raphael Moneo's new Prado extension with such evident relief.

The architectural critics of the London Times and The Guardian have been trying to outdo one another with the restraint of their superlatives: "quietly serious", "beautifully crafted", "wonderfully polite", "immaculately dressed".