As a new reader of your publication in Substack, I have been enjoying your clear definitions of architectural styles---classic, baroque, brutalist, and postmodern.
Next, I hope that you will tackle the distinctions between arts & crafts, beaux arts, art nouveau. art deco. . . and modern. In social media deco is often confused with modernism, although early deco buildings have neoclassical plans and proportions. A style of modern, streamline, is referred to as deco on Wikipedia.
I am a graphic designer, not an architect, but my father was an architect, Joe Black. J. J. Black (1900-1982). A good student if never a graduate of Columbia Architecture, Joe was hired by Harvey Wiley Corbett as a part time draftsman in 1924. This led to project design work for Raymond Hood, who had worked in Corbett's office. Joe had a long association with Wallace K. Harrison, another Corbett alumnus, and continued as a freelancer, working with other luminaries, such as Joseph Urban, Ralph Walker, and Edward Durell Stone. In 1929, now a registered architect, he joined the firm of associates put together (by Corbett) to design Rockefeller Center.
Joe got experience on some great modern buildings, but most of the time he was designing parts of beaux arts structures, such as the facade of the Ziegfeld Theater for Urban.
For Stone, he worked on the exteriors of what he called "Theater 2, the RKO theater on the southwest corner of 6th Ave, designed as a bookend to match the Music Hall. Finishing up with tenant alteration plans at Rockefeller Center through 1932, he hit the Depression slump in new constructions. With my mother and oldest sister, he moved to Midland, Texas in 1934. After the war he built a successful practice, mostly residential.
As a Corbett student, he was well schooled in architectural history, and kept up with the enormous changes in his lifetime. (He could date any building within a year or two, just by looking at it). Late in his life I asked him if he was happy to see the postmodern movement happening, and new appreciation for the beaux arts, which had been condemned by the modernists as hopelessly eclectic.
"Oh, Roger, I was never a beaux arts architect. I like to think of myself as arts & crafts."
This was about building "natural" buildings with great materials and beautiful craftsmanship, he explained.
Joe had always talked about Bertram Goodhue, as arts & crafts, even though he did many neoclassical, gothic, and Spanish colonial revivals. Joe was delighted that I was going to spend a lot of time as a choirboy in one of Goodhue's greatest buildings, St. Thomas Church in New York. He had a second generation connection through Corbett and Harrison---both having worked in Goodhue's office.
He explained to me that arts & crafts (a style rejected by modernists as cute and bourgeois) was an alternative route to modernism, taken by Wright and Lutyens. Goodhue blazed that trail. From the beginning he had begun to simplify the forms. At St. Thomas I saw how he smoothed out the moldings in the gothic stone arches to leave a plain limestone wall.) And he was happy to use machines to do the heavy lifting. (Lee Lowry, his sculpture discovery, had a shop with 100 men using power tools.) Later, Goodhue produced essentially modern buildings: the LA library and Nebraska state capitol.
This note has gone on too long, but I am fascinated in the alternative arts & crafts route to modernism. Most of my father's houses were "natural" and easy-to-take, with a lot of carefully laid masonry and hand-carved wood. But the commercial buildings used steel, concrete, and glass. And they were modern.
_ _ _
Hope you can clear up the distinctions between these styles, as you have done for the others!
After reading this, I'll never look at a pastiche pediment or whimsical column the same way. Your takedown of postmodernism's slide from subversion to shtick is the architectural wake-up call we need in an era of Instagrammable but empty buildings. The Venturi chapter alone should be taught in every architecture school.
As a new reader of your publication in Substack, I have been enjoying your clear definitions of architectural styles---classic, baroque, brutalist, and postmodern.
Next, I hope that you will tackle the distinctions between arts & crafts, beaux arts, art nouveau. art deco. . . and modern. In social media deco is often confused with modernism, although early deco buildings have neoclassical plans and proportions. A style of modern, streamline, is referred to as deco on Wikipedia.
I am a graphic designer, not an architect, but my father was an architect, Joe Black. J. J. Black (1900-1982). A good student if never a graduate of Columbia Architecture, Joe was hired by Harvey Wiley Corbett as a part time draftsman in 1924. This led to project design work for Raymond Hood, who had worked in Corbett's office. Joe had a long association with Wallace K. Harrison, another Corbett alumnus, and continued as a freelancer, working with other luminaries, such as Joseph Urban, Ralph Walker, and Edward Durell Stone. In 1929, now a registered architect, he joined the firm of associates put together (by Corbett) to design Rockefeller Center.
Joe got experience on some great modern buildings, but most of the time he was designing parts of beaux arts structures, such as the facade of the Ziegfeld Theater for Urban.
For Stone, he worked on the exteriors of what he called "Theater 2, the RKO theater on the southwest corner of 6th Ave, designed as a bookend to match the Music Hall. Finishing up with tenant alteration plans at Rockefeller Center through 1932, he hit the Depression slump in new constructions. With my mother and oldest sister, he moved to Midland, Texas in 1934. After the war he built a successful practice, mostly residential.
As a Corbett student, he was well schooled in architectural history, and kept up with the enormous changes in his lifetime. (He could date any building within a year or two, just by looking at it). Late in his life I asked him if he was happy to see the postmodern movement happening, and new appreciation for the beaux arts, which had been condemned by the modernists as hopelessly eclectic.
"Oh, Roger, I was never a beaux arts architect. I like to think of myself as arts & crafts."
This was about building "natural" buildings with great materials and beautiful craftsmanship, he explained.
Joe had always talked about Bertram Goodhue, as arts & crafts, even though he did many neoclassical, gothic, and Spanish colonial revivals. Joe was delighted that I was going to spend a lot of time as a choirboy in one of Goodhue's greatest buildings, St. Thomas Church in New York. He had a second generation connection through Corbett and Harrison---both having worked in Goodhue's office.
He explained to me that arts & crafts (a style rejected by modernists as cute and bourgeois) was an alternative route to modernism, taken by Wright and Lutyens. Goodhue blazed that trail. From the beginning he had begun to simplify the forms. At St. Thomas I saw how he smoothed out the moldings in the gothic stone arches to leave a plain limestone wall.) And he was happy to use machines to do the heavy lifting. (Lee Lowry, his sculpture discovery, had a shop with 100 men using power tools.) Later, Goodhue produced essentially modern buildings: the LA library and Nebraska state capitol.
This note has gone on too long, but I am fascinated in the alternative arts & crafts route to modernism. Most of my father's houses were "natural" and easy-to-take, with a lot of carefully laid masonry and hand-carved wood. But the commercial buildings used steel, concrete, and glass. And they were modern.
_ _ _
Hope you can clear up the distinctions between these styles, as you have done for the others!
_______________________________________________________________________________
Five samples of my father's work"
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1u4RYgRSWhyTkMWOkCRBK0nGeWUauXLfo?usp=sharing
Such a pretty writing. Thoroughly enjoyed 🥲
After reading this, I'll never look at a pastiche pediment or whimsical column the same way. Your takedown of postmodernism's slide from subversion to shtick is the architectural wake-up call we need in an era of Instagrammable but empty buildings. The Venturi chapter alone should be taught in every architecture school.