Why Architecture Matters

Author: Paul Goldberger Year: 2009 Source type: book Raw file: raw/books/goldberger_2009-why_architecture_matters.md — Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2009 (ISBN 978-0-300-14430-7).

Page citations follow the page breaks marked in the raw scan file; the scan includes unnumbered illustration plates, so its pagination runs lower than the printed edition's.

Summary

Goldberger's book is a critic's essay in the tradition of Copland's What to Listen for in Music: an attempt to explain what architecture does to us beyond keeping out the rain. Its central argument is that architecture matters when it takes on the qualities of art — when building is done with the awareness that it reaches beyond the practical — and that architecture can never be reduced to aesthetics alone, because it exists simultaneously as art and practicality, object and space, memory, time, and place. Against a single theory or a masterwork canon, Goldberger defends the everyday, vernacular, and ordinary registers of the built world as the ground of architectural experience, and he insists that architecture is the making of place and the making of memory — the ultimate physical representation of a culture and its most potent symbol of common ground.

The book proceeds through seven chapters — meaning/culture/symbol, challenge and comfort, architecture as object, architecture as space, architecture and memory, buildings and time, and buildings and the making of place — and closes with a glossary and a note on bibliography.

Key Claims

Architecture begins where shelter ends. "Architecture begins to matter when it goes beyond protecting us from the elements, when it begins to say something about the world—when it begins to take on the qualities of art." The practical need for shelter "is not the answer to the question posed by the title."
Architecture is both art and not art, at once. It is "balanced, precisely and precariously, between art and practicality," and its three Vitruvian elements — commodity, firmness, delight — are interdependent: "Without firmness and delight, commodity is nothing."
Intention is the threshold of architecture. A building is architecture "so long as its physical form reflects some degree of civilizing intent"; Goldberger's working definition is a practical construction "designed to be more than merely practical."
The high/low distinction is unusable. Against Pevsner's "A bicycle shed is a building, Lincoln Cathedral is architecture," Goldberger holds that the vernacular, commercial, and residential architecture of mall, strip, and suburb has a greater impact on where we live than a distant cathedral, and that the decorated tenement cornice was "a gesture of civilization."
Architecture has an ethical function. Following Karsten Harries, architecture "calls us out of the everyday, recalls us to the values presiding over our lives as members of a society"; one of its tasks is "to preserve at least a piece of utopia."
Architecture is a medium. Goldberger credits Frank Lloyd Wright's 1901 lecture "The Art and Craft of the Machine" as perhaps the early statement of architecture-as-media: "The book is about to kill the edifice," and architecture's symbolic power then passes into images.
Symbolism is historically bound. Banks can no longer be given meaningful architectural expression in an age of electronic cash: the classical temple survives as the computer icon for "bank," and classical banks built today become "cartoons built of stone" and "exercises in nostalgia."
Architecture can still make common ground. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is "the most important evidence the late twentieth century produced that design can still serve as a unifying social force," and by abstraction rather than figuration.
Challenge and comfort must be synthesized. Art "exists to challenge, not to coddle," but architecture must also console; the answer is a synthesis in which aesthetic challenge and physical comfort "should be considered entitled to coexist."
"Function" is the wrong criterion; "comfort" is better. "Form follows function" "turns out, once you dig into it, to mean very little at all" — and "is not visual pleasure… a kind of function, too?" A hospital that moves patients efficiently but feels cold is a functional failure on Goldberger's account, an idea he names support for in the evidence-based design movement.
The social responsibility of architecture is bounded. Architects are not makers of public policy: "It is not the architect's role to solve the problem of housing the poor. It is the architect's role to give the poor the very best housing possible when society decides that it is ready."
Buildings are objects whose composition obeys balance and ordered surprise. Following Rasmussen and Arnheim, perception works through hardness/softness, heaviness/lightness, solid/void; but "surprise is essential," and the best buildings give us what is "not just unexpected but right" — "familiar and new… order and novelty, intensity and repose, all at once."
Space is architecture's aesthetic reality. Interior space "will almost always provoke a greater emotional response than the outside of a building does"; space can be directed or focused, and Le Corbusier called the highest of it "ineffable space."
Architecture exists in time as movement. Philip Johnson's procession thesis — "the organization of procession. Architecture exists only in time" — is upheld: we first see a building from afar, then closer, then from within, and the plan is the guide to that movement; Saarinen called the goal "non-static" space.
Memory is a constitutive part of architectural experience. Vincent Scully's "architecture is a conversation between the generations" frames the chapter; architectural memory is both personal and shared, and it is formed as much by painting, photography, film, television, and novels as by direct experience.
Nothing is timeless; reputation follows a cycle. Buildings and careers must "fall into disfavor before they can be appreciated on the scale of history" (after Summerson); the World Trade Center passed from resentment through acceptance to architectural martyrdom.
Preservation is a democratic and legal achievement, not nostalgia. Summerson's 1947 "The Past in the Future" named the category "the building whose only virtue is that in a bleak tract of modernity, it alone gives depth in time"; New York's Landmarks Law survived the Penn Station loss and reached the U.S. Supreme Court over Grand Central in 1978, and "a building lost is never regained."
Cities are made by streets more than by buildings. "The whole is more than the sum of its parts" is, for Goldberger, the single most important principle of urban architecture; he distinguishes background from foreground buildings and warns that either an excess or an absence of foreground buildings ruins a street.
Sense of place is eroding under a homogenizing technological regime. Cyberspace, the automobile, and the highway dissolve the traditional rootedness of place; the "privatization of the public realm" — malls, festival marketplaces, atrium lobbies, gated communities — and the "new urban paradigm" of self-contained edge cities replace the common ground of the traditional city.
Architecture's task is the making of place and memory. "Architecture is the making of place and the making of memory," and in an age of the virtual, "architecture represents the real, and that is ever more precious."

Connections

Concepts: architecture-as-media, architectural-intention, commodity-firmness-and-delight, ethical-function-of-architecture, challenge-and-comfort, architecture-as-object, architecture-as-space, procession, ineffable-space, non-static-architecture, ordered-surprise, architectural-memory, architectural-martyrdom, historic-preservation, ever-continuing-past, style-for-the-time, timelessness, street-as-room, sense-of-place, new-urban-paradigm, whole-greater-than-parts, background-and-foreground-buildings

Authors: goldberger-paul, summerson-john, jacobs-jane, venturi-robert, harries-karsten, norberg-schulz-christian, wharton-edith, rossi-aldo, bachelard-gaston, jencks-charles

Debates: everyday-vs-iconic-architecture, spectacle-vs-function, postmodernism-vs-modernism, tradition-vs-innovation, static-vs-dynamic-architecture, form-vs-program

Themes: vernacular-architecture, the-debate-over-iconic-architecture, the-image-economy

Direct Quotes

"We could not live without architecture, but that is not why it matters." (p. 8)

"Architecture begins to matter when it goes beyond protecting us from the elements, when it begins to say something about the world—when it begins to take on the qualities of art." (p. 8)

"There is no doubt whatever about the influence of architecture and structure upon human character and action. We make our buildings and afterwards they make us. They regulate the course of our lives." — Winston Churchill, epigraph (p. 14)

"A bicycle shed is a building, Lincoln Cathedral is architecture," wrote the art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, but what of it? Both are buildings, both are architecture." (p. 14)

"Architecture is balanced, precisely and precariously, between art and practicality." (p. 17)

"Vitruvius, writing in ancient Rome around 30 bc, set out the three elements of architecture as 'commodity, firmness, and delight'… Without firmness and delight, commodity is nothing." (p. 17)

"Architecture is the ultimate physical representation of a culture, more so than even its flag." (p. 23)

"The book is about to kill the edifice." — Goldberger on Wright's reworking of Victor Hugo, "The Art and Craft of the Machine" (p. 35)

"'Architecture has an ethical function in that it calls us out of the everyday, recalls us to the values presiding over our lives as members of a society; it beckons us toward a better life, a bit closer to the ideal,' Harries wrote. 'One task of architecture is to preserve at least a piece of utopia…'" (p. 39)

"I do not think of art as Consolation. I think of it as Creation. I think of it as an energetic space that begets energetic space." — Jeanette Winterson, quoted (p. 45)

"'The noblest architecture can sometimes do less for us than a siesta or an aspirin,' the philosopher Alain de Botton wrote in The Architecture of Happiness." (p. 49)

"'Form follows function,' that old chestnut of modern architecture, turns out, once you dig into it, to mean very little at all… And is not visual pleasure, which that cliché willfully ignores, a kind of function, too?" (pp. 49–50)

"'Less is a bore.'" — Robert Venturi, quoted (p. 84)

"'Architecture is surely not the design of space, certainly not the massing or organizing of volumes. These are auxiliary to the main point, which is the organization of procession. Architecture exists only in time.'" — Philip Johnson, quoted (p. 98)

"'Nothing is timeless. Everything tells us something about the age in which it was made and in some way signals us as to what that age was.'" (p. 138)

"In a city, time becomes visible." — Lewis Mumford, epigraph (p. 131)

"I suppose that all architecture has to die before it can touch the historical imagination." — Sir John Summerson, epigraph (p. 131)

"'It is condescending and unpractical to assume we understand another time well enough to recreate it,' Hardy said at the time. 'The past is not a costume rack that we loot to suit our fancy.'" (p. 154)

"I will go further and say that this is the single most important principle of urban architecture: the whole is more than the sum of its parts." (p. 163)

"A building lost is never regained. That is perhaps the strongest argument for proceeding cautiously and assuring that the difficult decisions about what to save are not made in response to the short cycles of taste and fashion." (p. 158)

"But the bulk of people cannot afford the choice of spending time in such settings… Indeed, the truly defining characteristic of this time might be said to be the privatization of the public realm." (p. 170)

"Architecture, I will say again, is the making of place and the making of memory." (p. 172)

"Architecture represents the real, and that is ever more precious in an age of the virtual. Every piece of architecture is an opportunity for real experience." (p. 173)

Open Questions

Is the "synthesis" of challenge and comfort actually achievable, or does Goldberger's own account (the Savoyes, Farnsworth) show that great architecture is by nature hostile to its occupants and the synthesis is only available to the non-resident viewer?
Does the ethical function (Harries) survive Goldberger's limit on the architect's social role — designing only "the best buildings" that a willing society pays for — or does bounding the profession's responsibility to the brief quietly collapse ethics into aesthetics?
If architecture is "the ultimate physical representation of a culture," how does that claim fare against the book's own argument that symbolism is historically bound (the bank-icon case) and increasingly generic across cities?
The preservation argument turns on "cycles of taste" that Goldberger documents (SoHo cast-iron, Art Deco, Rudolph's Yale building); if taste is cyclical, on what non-taste grounds can "a building lost is never regained" justify the restraint he demands?
Is "sense of place" really lost, or relocated into the design-afforded places of cyberspace and the edge city — and can the "new urban paradigm" sustain any genuine common ground, or only disengagement marketed as urbanity?
Goldberger explicitly declines theory and a universal recipe; does the book's pattern of evaluative judgments (Gehry, Kahn, Wright as heroes; Hirshhorn, GM Building, Madison Square Garden as failures) in fact constitute a theory of taste it never defends?