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Building
Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture
by Paul Goldberger
The Monacelli Press, 2009
Hardcover, 224 pages
In the introduction to his collection
of magazine articles -- mostly from The New Yorker's
"Sky Line" column -- over roughly the last 15
years, Paul Goldberger explains that his criticism does
not only look at pieces of architecture as aesthetic objects.
He attests to placing the building he critiques "within
a context that enhances its meaning," primarily social
and political contexts. This assertion comes across in the
backgrounds that Goldberger provides for most of the buildings
he examines. He points out the cheap mass labor in China
relative to the architecture of the 2008 Olympics and the
Basques' remaking of Bilbao with Frank Gehry's Guggenheim,
two less-than-subtle examples of the best qualities of Goldberger's
writings. Making my way through the nearly sixty essays
collected here -- some I've read previously in The New
Yorker and Metropolis -- I realized the contextual
information that Goldberger provides is tempered by a couple
things: the selection of buildings and places he covers
and an overriding emphasis on aesthetics and form that runs
counter to his assertions.
Writing for a New York-based magazine
named for the city, it's not surprising that many buildings
critiqued by Goldberger are in Manhattan. Like other critics
in print today, this local coverage is accompanied by the
occasional foray to other states and overseas when notable
buildings open. In both cases -- home and away -- celebrity
architects are the norm. Be it Calatrava, Gehry, Koolhaas,
the prevalence of big names points to architecture's infatuation
with formal invention in the years Goldberger collects here,
as well as media's role creating and maintaining the celebrity
status of these and other architects. Every so often Goldberger
covers a building like Platt
Byard Dovell White's New 42nd Street Studios in Times
Square, though usually bundled with other buildings in the
article. He also tackles the urbanism of places like Havana
and Las Vegas, but New York receives its own chapter and
the greatest amount of context for the reader digesting
all or most of the essays here.
Reading the book in relation to Goldberger's
assertion in the introduction about aesthetic discussions
of buildings being rooted in social and political contexts,
certain descriptions about the appearance of buildings are
troubling. For example, Christian
de Portzamparc's LVMH Tower in Midtown Manhattan is
described in terms of the history of the skyscraper and
the French fashion house's desire to express its "innovation
and chic." Fair enough, but when Goldberger says, "this
is too good an abstract design to be discussed in terms
of trite visual analogies," he does just that, comparing
it to an oversized woman and her skirt. Admittedly this
sort of aesthetic dumbing-down and betrayal of his convictions
is infrequent enough that the essays don't read like a laundry
list of visual analogies. Overall the context that Goldberger
presents is the most valuable information for the reader,
with his criticism exuding more common sense than an entirely
unique or new perspective. The essays here capture a period
when architectural bombast captured everyone's attention
and when critics tried to make sense of it.
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