Dancing about Architecture

Haiti: Reflections, Probably Too Soon

Tue, 8 Jun 2010 10:23:00 -0500

I've been back from Haiti for a week and still have not sorted out everything I saw, heard, felt and smelled there. It was a sensory overload. Diesel exhaust, charcoal smoke and concrete dust fill the air, the concrete kicked up from piles of rubble by every passing vehicle.
Jacmel, a city of about 70,000 on the south coast (photos above and right) and the site our our project, though damaged by the January 12 earthquake, was in much better shape than the capital, Port au Prince (below right and below). Clean-up and repair is molasses slow and most of the money pledged for reconstruction is lodged in the bureaucracies of governments and NGO’s.
Many organizations and individuals are working to help the people of Haiti, and they do need help. It seems to me that any group can only pick a place and go to work. The problems are too large and varied for global solutions, but if everyone working towards solutions will share their successes and give warnings about their failures I think there is a chance we can help the Haitians make their dreadfully damaged country a much better place to live.
Our project, led by the Christian NGO Global Effect is, I think, a good one: If we’re successful it will provide jobs and homes for at least 1,000 Haitian families in a new community on the outskirts of Jacmel.
I’ll post more, probably much more, as I sort this out in my own mind and as the project progresses.

On New Urbanism & Being Town Architect

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:59:46 -0500

This blog post was originally printed in in slightly different form in the Fall 2007 issue of Rosemary Beach’s “Rosemary Thymes.”
I feel privileged to be the town architect of Rosemary Beach as we near completion of the initial construction of this amazing community. I’m thrilled to be able to continue the vision formed by Rosemary Beach’s developers and planners, and extended by our homeowners, our previous town architects, numerous design architects, our builders and our town staff.
Rosemary Beach is recognized as one of the finest, most beautiful new towns in America, if not the world. Our town is known and noted for the coherence, quality and elegance of its architecture. Rosemary Beach is not only beautiful; it is a comfortable, relaxed, even calming place to live, work or visit. It is one of the premier examples of the work of the New Urbanism.
Rosemary Beach was founded in 1995, but if you ignore the continuing construction for a few moments it can feel more like 100 or even 200 years old, not fewer that fifteen. This is intentional. The planning and design of Rosemary Beach are based on principles drawn from the places that we love and love to visit: Charleston and Savannah, even Paris, Siena and Rome. From the beginning, Rosemary Beach was intended not only to please, but to endure.
New Urbanism is “new” not because of the results achieved, so much as the means of getting there. We now have to do quickly through study, planning and specific intent what town builders did in past ages did slowly based on tradition and necessity. New Urbanism attempts to do purposefully what our culture forgot how to do naturally during the 20th century.
Rapid adoption of the automobile as the primary means of transportation led planners, architects, developers, builders and government regulators to design, to build, and in many places even to require new development that is dominated by cars. Somewhere along the way we realized that many of us didn’t really like the new places that we were building.
New Urbanism looks beyond the dominance of the automobile and attempts to learn from the best of the entire history of human settlement. By bringing the best of the past into the future, we hope to learn to build communities that accommodate modern technologies, including the automobile, but that are dominated by people, not by machines. Though study, observation, measurement and a little bit of inspiration New Urbanists attempt to design new places that are functional, livable and even beautiful.
Places worth caring about. Places that we love to visit and love to live in. Places like Rosemary Beach.

Is it Architecture? Libeskind in Denver

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:27:41 -0500

Many years ago, one of the partners in the first firm I worked for as an intern architect, probably Carroll Henley, said, I think about his own work, “We don’t always achieve architecture.” He was making a distinction between what he considered the art of architecture and the craft (or less) of building. I would make the argument that not all art that is a building “achieves architecture” either.
Carroll was, and is, a dedicated modernist, so he might object to going back 2000 years for a definition of what constitutes architecture, but no one has ever stated the criteria as well or as succinctly as Vitruvius, retired engineer for Augustus Caesar: “Commoditas, Firmitas, Venustas,” as most often directly translated,” commodity, firmness, and delight,” or in more modern English, usefulness, durability and beauty.
Which leads me to my recent experience with Daniel Libeskind’s Frederic C. Hamilton Building for the Denver Art Museum. The Hamilton Building in its vertiginous, derivative-of-Frank-Gehry way is a thing of beauty. I know many of my traditionalist and classicist colleagues will disagree, but it is an impressive work of monumental sculpture. I couldn’t experience the full intended impact of the building from the exterior, though, because a large section of the roof had been pulled off and wrapped in plastic, and the approach to the entrance was through a scaffolding and plywood tunnel, presumably placed to prevent injury to pedestrians from the repair work above.
Libeskind’s Hamilton Building, in my opinion, fails as architecture on two counts: It leaks and it is a lousy place to display art.
The roof of the Hamilton Building began to leak shortly after the building opened in 2006. A second leak sprang up in January 2007. I don’t know if there have been more leaks, but roof repairs are still underway. A often stated goal of Modern architecture is to push the envelope of building technology, but a leaky museum, even if it is structurally sound, has failed at “firmitas” and is very close to failing to function. Priceless art works cannot be left out in the rain.
Then there are the alleged galleries. Walls swing and skew and lean at odd angles. A common reaction to the interior is excitement tempered by nausea. I suppose workable exhibits of mobiles and free-standing sculpture could inhabit the Hamilton building, but this is a really awful place to exhibit paintings. They hang from wires, distractingly tilted off the not-vertical walls. The only art that can be properly viewed in the Hamilton Building is the Hamilton Building itself. The apparent function of the Hamilton Building is not to be a place to display art, but to be art itself.
That this structure is monumental art and occupiable does not make it architecture. The statue of liberty and the Great Buddha of Kamakura are architecture by that standard. No one would argue that both are monumental figurative scuplture. That they are figurative sculpture and the Hamilton Building is abstract does not change the conclusion: Daniel Libeskind has designed a massive abstract sculpture and Denver has paid for it in the guise of an addition to its city museum.
Minimal commodity, bad firmness, debatable delight. This is not architecture.
Architecture has a greater responsibility to the community and to posterity than to be just monumental sculpture. Architecture must have a function and fulfill that function. Architecture must stand up and protect against the elements. Architecture must be beautiful. One and a half out of three is not sufficient.

Dancing about Architecture

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:31:24 -0500

This is my first post, so please bear with me. I’m calling my blog “Dancing About Architecture” in part because it IS about architecture...and music and urbanism and sustainability and climate change anything else that I think is important enough to write about.
OK, there’s another blog called “dancing about architecture” and that guy actually has the “dancingaboutarchitecture.com” domain. That blog seems to be mostly about current American popular music. I don’t like much current American popular music; there’s so much more interesting going on musically in the world. But that’s another post.
The name fits for this blog so I’m going to use it.
The quote, “Talking (or writing) about music is like dancing about architecture,” has been attributed to Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, Thelonius Monk, Laurie Anderson, Clara Schuman, Igor Stravinsky, Steve Martin, and Martin Mull among others. Elvis Costello is quoted in a magazine interview as saying “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture; it’s a really stupid thing to do.” (1) Elvis, though, has said he doesn’t remember saying it. We may never know where it started.
I don’t think writing about music, or dancing about architecture for that matter, is a stupid thing to do. It’s probably more productive and definitely more interesting to make or listen to music, or to design or experience architecture, but occasionally things need an explanation. And words and pictures are the ways people explain things. So writing about music and architecture and all those other things, with occasional images and audio clips, seems like a good idea.
There is truth, though, in the implicit absurdity of the statement, “writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Music, architecture, dance, art in general are much better experienced directly that written or talked about. I’ll try to point out ways and sources to get to those direct experiences in future posts.
For now please see the web links elsewhere on this site, listen to my radio show, Musical Journeys on 30A Radio from 10 to noon Saturdays, Central Time and look for future posts to this blog. You can subscribe to “Dancing About Architecture at the RSS link on the main blog page.

Thank you.

Frank Greene

(1) Timothy White,"A Man out of Time Beats the Clock." Musician No. 60 (October 1983), p. 52.