Move over, Prince Charles. Former Boston University president John Silber covets your title as the world's leading Architecture Crank.
To be fair, there are some fascinating moments in Silber's new book, "Architecture of the Absurd: How 'Genius' Disfigured a Practical Art." Silber dedicates the book to his father, an architect "totally lacking in the political skills" - sound familiar? In 1952, his father took young John to hear Frank Lloyd Wright lecture in New York. Silber put up his hand and asked an arcane question; "Wright was not impressed and quickly dismissed my impertinence," he writes.
Buy the book if you want to read some predictable fulminations on the arty depredations of Daniel Libeskind, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry. (Silber thinks Gehry's Stata Center at MIT is gaudy - not Gaudi - trash, and so do I.) Silber also unloads on the Boston University campus, a dumping ground for some bad buildings by Harvard-certified genius Josep Lluis Sert. Silber pats BU on the back for "improving" two of Sert's buildings, and makes much of his ability to read architectural blueprints.
So what about the buildings that he commissioned during his 32 years at the university's helm? Buffalo-based Cannon Design built three of his most visible legacies: the John Hancock Student Village, the Photonics building, and the management school building, which incorporated Silber's posh, $30 million administration offices, dubbed the "Taj Mahal." In a phone interview, Silber emphasized that BU always built on a budget, and called Cannon's work "by no means fancy but highly functional," which seems right to me.
And don't call my old office the Taj Mahal! "Yale and Harvard have beautiful facilities for their presidents, and for their alumni," Silber said. "It's fine for them to have lovely premises, but BU better not aspire to anything excellent? That's a slur on the university that I refuse to accept."
Tough reading
In a perfect world there wouldn't be a literature of cystic fibrosis. But that is not the world we live in.
Two years ago, Williamsburg author Roland Merullo published the widely praised novel, "A Little Love Story," about a romance between a house painter and an attractive political aide named Janet Rossi who has CF. (Cystic fibrosis is a lung disease that often proves fatal in childhood. The median life expectancy of America's 30,000 patients is 37.)
This year, a book by Teresa Anne Mullin, who used to work at the Globe, was posthumously published. "The Stones Applaud: How Cystic Fibrosis Shaped My Childhood" is a wrenching account of her struggles in boarding school at Exeter, at Children's Hospital, and as a student at Harvard. Teresa died in 1991, shortly after finishing Harvard, after being turned down for a lung transplant.
Last week, Dean Barnett, a staff writer for the Weekly Standard, published "The Plucky Smart Kid With the Fatal Disease," an 8,000-word essay in The New Pamphleteer, an Internet-based publishing company that will send you both a digital and paper version of Barnett's work for $4. (Its website is pamphleteerpress.com.) Barnett's article hit me like a ton of bricks, because in the opening scene he is competing in a 1992 race up the steps of the John Hancock Tower, finishing 29th in a field of 150. Cystic fibrosis patients don't do that.
Barnett, now 40, has been blessed with remarkable health for a CF patient. He also attended Harvard and, like Teresa, was a patient of the legendary Dr. Harry Shwachman at Children's. Barnett now lifts weights and walks on a treadmill, but he has been at death's door more than once. In his essay, he calls CF "an amazing journey to the center of my life."
Talk about a local angle. Barnett grew up in Newton, and his father was head of the local CF chapter. His father befriended businessman Joe O'Donnell, also the parent of a boy with CF, who launched the Joey Fund charity. The Joey Fund subsidized a medical team in Australia that was experimenting with an inhaled saline solution for CF patients. Barnett calls the saline inhalant "a genuine, bona fide, 100% pure miracle," which he started taking just when he was looking at the grimmest, high-risk treatment option for CF patients, the lung transplant.
The transplant proved to be unnecessary. The last time he saw O'Donnell, he looked the businessman in the eye and said, "You saved my life."
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.
