• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

S- 0 SOUTHERN EDUCATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIA Tlon SECA PRESENTS ® Firing Line" /> The copyright laws of the United States (Title 17, U.S. Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. If a user makes a request for, or later uses a photocopy or reproduction (including handwritten copies) for purposes in excess of fair use, that user may be liable for copyright infringement. Users are advised to obtain permission from the copyright owner before any re-use of this material. Use of this material is for private, non-comercial, and educational purposes; additional reprints and further distribution is prohibited. Copies are not for resale. All other rights reserved. For further information, contact Director, Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-6010 © Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. II FIRinG Line "WHY AREN'T GOOD BUILDINGS BEING BUILT?" Guests: Ada Louise Huxtable James Rossant A'" .~ (Pe>s- 0 SOUTHERN EDUCATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIA TlON SECA PRESENTS ® FIRinG Line Host: WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY,JR. Guests: Ada Louise Huxtable James Rossant The FIRING LINE television series is a production of the Southern Educational Subject: "Why Aren't Good Buildings Being Built?" Communications Association, 928 Woodrow St., p. O. Box 5966, Columbia, S.C., 29205, and is transmitted through the facilities of the Public Broadcasting Service. Production of these Student Participants: Jeff Feingold - Pratt Institute programs is made possible through a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Leslie Blum - Pratt Institute FI RING LINE can be seen and heard each week through public television and radio stations Roger Ferri - Pratt Institute throughout the country. Check your local newspapers for channel and time in your area. FIRING LINE is produced and directed by WARREN STEIBEL This is a transcript of the FIRING LINE program recorded in New York City on November 2, 1971, and telecast on PBS on November 7, 1971. Cover Artwork· Ronald G. Chapiesky SOUTHERN EDUCATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION © Board of Trustees of th Leland Stanford Jr. University. MR. BUCKLEY: Ada Louise Huxtable is the when I go to see some of the work of our architectural critic for the New York Times, most prestigious artists and architects." whose opinion on new buildings or new I should like to begin by asking Mrs. urban projects is awaited as solicitously as Huxtable: what makes bad architects? the opening night reviews of a new play. She has served as Assistant Curator of MRS. HUXTAB LE: What makes bad Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, architects? is the author of several books, most recently a collection of criticism called Will They MR. BUCKLEY: Yeah. Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? And those of you who do not immediately understand MRS. HUXTABLE: Or what makes bad that there is a Bruckner Boulevard in your architecture? Do you want to separate the life are better off viewing another channel. two? Do you want to take them separately, Mrs. Huxtable, who has honorary or together? doctorate degrees from several colleges, won her most recent journalistic award this MR. BUCKLEY: Which would you prefer? morning for her review of the Kennedy Center in Washington. MRS. HUXTABLE: I'd rat~er say: why do Mr. James Rossant is a graduate of the we get bad buildings? Because I don't blame Harvard Graduate School of Design, a it completely on the architect. member of the architect and planning firm of Mayer & Whittlesey, a lecturer in MR. BUCKLEY: Do bad architects make architecture at Columbia, New York bad arch itecture? University, and M.I.T., best known as the designer of the planned community near MRS. HUXTABLE: Bad architects make bad Washington, D.C., at Reston, Virginia. architecture. Bad clients make bad architecture. Bad laws make bad MR. ROSSANT: Excuse me. Correction: architecture. Bad union practices make bad © 1971 SOUTHERN EDUCATIONAL Conklin & Rossant has been the name of the architecture. It's an extremely complex firm for the past five years. subject, and there are many things that COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION contribute to it. MR. BUCKLEY: Oh, I'm so sorry. Conklin & Rossant. Excuse me. MR. BUCKLEY: Well, suppose we ask: what I hope to get from Mrs. Huxtable and is it that causes some people who have had, Mr. Rossant some ideas about the teachirlg let's say, an identical experience - if any of beauty, which will commit us, of course, two people do have an identical experience to an examination of the architecture of - but roughly a comparable cultural beauty. Everyone here appears to be experience - to permit their names to be committed to the idea that a conscious affixed to pieces of architecture which you effort along the lines of teaching about would find scandalous? Is it all those beauty can, if not solve the problem, extrinsic reasons, or is it that they consider mitigate the problem. it to be beautiful, and are wrong? Mrs. Huxtable, in her book, quotes from the autobiography of George Kennan: MRS. HUXTABLE: I don't think I quite "No one, to the day of my graduation from understand your question. Do you mean: Princeton," he wrote, "ever taught me to why would an architect let his name be put look understandingly at a painting or a tree, on a building that responded to all of these or at the facade of a building." Another factors over which he really didn't have writer wrote, a few years ago: "If I were a much control? teacher, I do not know what techniques I would use beyond attempting to stimu late a MR. BUCKLEY: Yeah - while his fellow mere interest in the question. Perhaps I architect was creating beautiful buildings. would try showing the children slides of various buildings and asking, 'Is this ugly? Is MRS. HUXTABLE: Well, I think we should this beautiful?' and bringing down a ruler on ask Mr. Rossant. the knuckles of the blockhead who grunts the wrong answer. I will do so," he wrote, MR. ROSSANT: I would put the question a "with due recognition of the hazard of my bit differently, or at least the answer a bit undertaking, because my own knuckles are differently. If you're talking about how we constantly being rapped; as, for instance, are conditioned to appreciate or even design © Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. a beautiful building, I think it has a lot to do necessary goods, to ship them out, to import person who plays it atrociously. NoV\(, this done with buildings, because buildings are with the framework of buildings. Much as a them; but beyond that, one should live in can't be stopped, because there's an in-built not so easily transportable. And we're not theatre is the framework of plays, the city is the country, in tranquility. And you find spontaneity in the playing of a particular used to- the framework of buildings. We have been this, after all, in Thoreau, Emerson, and piece in front of an audience which, conditioned 111 ihls COU,ltry, throughout our Jefferson - a great abhorrence of the city. however, does not apply to architecture, MRS. HUXTABLE: But, Jim, you're still history, in ;r·mp.thinj of an anti-urban Thoreau, of course, in Walden, was one of where yOll make the sketches and a whole thinking of a building in context. philosohy, or 0,'" . ban condition. We are our most vehement anti-urbanists. lot of people - colleagues and so on - look taught to !1;,t.. cities, to hate brick and at them; and yet you can, even spending the MR. ROSSANT: Of course. Buildings must mortar and, on the contrary, to love trees MRS. HUXTABLE: I just wanted to say that same number of dollars per cubic foot, come be in context. and nature, from our Founding Fathers. I find this a completely 19th-century view of up with something that both of you are Jefferson detested cities. the city, rather than a 20th-century view. entranced by, or something that both of you MRS. HUXTABLE: But as an object - as an We had escaped the evils of Europe, abhor. object in context - and the evils of Europe were personified in MR. ROSSANT: I agree. the cities. Over here, I think - MRS. HUXTABLE: Perhaps for different MR. ROSSANT: Yes. MRS. HUXTABLE: I think that we are not reasons. MR. BUCKLEY: But so many of the cities really so much guilty of that as the 19th MRS. HUXTABLE: is the way you're were so beaut it· century was. I think the problem is so much MR. BUCKLEY: Yeah, but let's leave that defining it. more basic in judging why a building is bad, aside for one minute. Why is it that there is why it's satisfactory, why it's unsatisfactory. MR. ROSSANT: Not to the intellectuals and such a disparity in judgment? Is there an MR. ROSSANT: Yes. It has to be. And the Founding Fathers of the time. To them, And if you notice, I'm studiously avoiding expertise, or is it really something the world "beautiful" - that's how an architect works. He works the cities may have been attractive, but they subjective? Are you really gambling on a with the land, he works with client, with the did represent the kings, the royalty, the historic verdict when you denounce this bureaucracy that may be acting on him at MR. BUCKLEY: Yes, I know. building or praise another one? oppressors. They represented evil, in other the moment. He works in the city, and he words. Everything that was bad about the works in the street. A building, unlike all system of politics in Europe was represented MRS.

Load more

  11

Copy Link