I have found that if you ask a typical American to name a couple of famous architects from any period of history, he will recall Frank Lloyd Wright and then go absolutely blank while trying to think of a second one. Likewise, if you ask him who designed the Empire State Building, the Paris Opera House or St. Peter`s in Rome, he will simply stare at you.
The fault here, I think, is that architecture is ignored by most school curriculum makers. We are taught to rattle off the names of generals, memorize state capitals and understand that butterflies are of the order Lepidoptera. Practically all of us learn to recognize Beethoven`s 5th if somebody whistles the first four notes. Architecture, however, is regarded as a field of knowledge as arcane as alchemy, dowsing or mutagenesis–even though it affects us more profoundly than any of the other arts.
It follows, then, that if one is predicting which of today`s architects will be remembered a century from now, one must first assume that architects and scholars will be doing most of the remembering. The average person
(exempting architecture buffs) will still go blank.
That said, I will predict away, secure in the knowledge I`ll have gone to the Acropolis in the Sky before anyone can prove I was wrong.
As a preamble to this prognostication, though, let us back up a bit and think about who–and what–in architecture has retained its strength in the last 100 years.
Thousands of important, beautiful and even magnificent structures built in the late 1800s have been torn down. Among those that survive and still project a powerful international image, we find that some, such as the Eiffel Tower (1889) and the Brooklyn Bridge (1883), aren`t tenanted buildings. Nor are their engineer-designers (Gustave Eiffel and John Roebling) remembered for much of anything else. Perhaps this gives us a clue about architectural fame. If we consider distinguished commercial American buildings of the same period, we think of Chicago`s 1889 Auditorium Building by Adler & Sullivan, the 1891 Monadnock by Burnham & Root and the 1894 Marquette by Holabird and Roche. Superstar designers of those days were creating the Chicago ”School” of architecture, a muscular style that burgeoned into a new way of thinking about tall buildings.
In New York the fashionable firm of McKim, Mead & White was turning out libraries, mansions and men`s clubs that survive in large numbers and make all the landmark lists. Another giant was H.H. Richardson, whose Trinity Church and Public Library remain among Boston`s greatest architectural treasures.
Collectively, all of this American big city work of the late 19th Century speaks of solidity, elegance and a quality of craftsmanship highly regarded by scholars and critics.
Abroad, architecture created in the late 1800s and still admired ranges from the works of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow to those of Antonio Gaudi in Barcelona. It was such a fertile design period in so many countries that one hesitates to offer even a greatly abridged list of the surviving standouts.
But back to the present–or, rather, the future:
In even the most casual musing about today`s architects destined for a place in history, the name of Philip Johnson comes to mind first. No other living designer has exerted so profound an effect on the course of
architecture for the last half-century.
New York architect Johnson, 80, has twice put his powerful imprimatur on stylistic changes of global consequence. In 1932 he invented the term
”International Style,” co-authored a book about it and curated an exhibition of modernist works at the Museum of Modern Art. This act of definition and espousal gave the Bauhaus-bred less-is-more look an impetus that helped it dominate architecture for several decades.
Fifty years later Johnson thumbed his nose at the Bauhaus, designed New York`s Chippendale-topped AT&T Building and put his cachet on the historicist Postmodern style that has kept architecture in a state of sometimes silly turbulence ever since.
But will historians remember Johnson essentially as a designer of specific buildings or as a heavily credentialed and revolutionary-spirited Manhattan tastemaker? I suspect his latter role will carry more weight, particularly because radical Postmodernists have upstaged Johnson with more outrageous designs.
Which brings up another point: Won`t some buildings of today be recollected by architectural historians and buffs long after the names of their designers have been all but forgotten? Quite likely, and one structure that leaps to mind is the Sydney Opera House, that powerful waterfront structure of soaring white curves. Its astonishing visual strength surely guarantees its survival in architecture books of the next century. Yet who knows that a Dane named Jorn Utzon designed it? Will anybody care 100 years hence?
The matter of survival also applies to the physical durability of buildings themselves. American architects will tell you that the expected life of a skyscraper constructed today is only about 50 years. It is difficult to imagine a glassy bauble such as the State of Illinois Center surviving until the year 2087. Yet that does not mean that photographs of vanished buildings won`t earn immortality in scholarly reference works (”This is the spectacular office building mandated by Illinois Gov. James Thompson and designed by architect Helmut Jahn before an earthquake reduced it to polychromatic rubbish in 1998”.)
In any event, who besides Philip Johnson seems destined for recollection? Among those we can count on are:
Robert Venturi, the Philadelphian whose 1966 book, ”Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” provided the philosophical underpinnings for the Postmodern movement that Johnson later certified and made chic. Venturi`s buildings are no longer uniformly ugly, by the way, and historians may even remember the man as a practitioner as well as a theoretician and polemicist.
John Portman, the Atlanta designer who reintroduced grandly scaled spaces and pizzazz to American architecture in the 1960s, when he began creating vast atrium hotel lobbies with exposed elevator cabs and cocktail lounges in the center of miniature lakes. Portman has never been popular among curatorial and bookish types, probably because he has given the public what it likes and made a good living at it.
Bertrand Goldberg, the Chicago architect whose serpentine, rippling, petaled concrete creations such as Marina City, River City and countless hospitals constitute an architecture all his own. History remembers maverick form makers. Goldberg will be chronicled as a utopian intellectual who disdained the mainstream.
James Stirling, a Briton who has gone through Modernism, Brutalism, Romantic High-Tech and goodness knows what else. It sounds helter-skelter, but out of this evolution Stirling has developed a very personal architecture that integrates with immense virtuosity a stunning number of historical references. The result is not the insubstantiality of collage, but a strong and moving amalgam that makes powerful buildings. Examine, for example, Stirling`s Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. The man is clearly one of our century`s new giants with a reputation that will long endure.
Richard Rogers, another English architect–but one of more kink than class. That is why he let the mechanical guts spill out of Pompidou Centre in Paris and more recently turned out a kind of oil refinery with windows in the center of London for the offices and trading rooms of Lloyd`s. Rogers`
approach to architecture may be outre, but it is precisely the quality that will ensure his place in history.
Kenzo Tange, the prolific Japanese architect-planner who has gone through periods in which he concentrated on Brutalist buildings turned out in exposed concrete, International Style towers in glass and steel and one-of-a-kind-essays, such as the stadium complex for the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Most Tange buildings derive their visual power from the expression of structure. If many are also graceless, that has not detracted from his appeal to scholars.
Arata Isozaki, another but much younger Japanese who manipulates forms, materials and metaphors in a stylishly eclectic way that is much admired by Postmodernists and is beginning to attract commissions in the U.S. The polished and enigmatic quality of Isozaki`s work has put him into a trajectory of popularity that seems certain of certification by historians.
You say that more than a trace of insubstantiality is reflected in the collective work of these famous men? Well, of course. We are not exactly living in the Renaissance. That is a fact of life not likely to go unremarked by the historians, either.
