MIT Sues Gehry

What makes a building art is not its audacity but its sensitive response to site, community, inhabitants and program. As my old mentor Lou Kahn well put it "even buildings 'want-to-be'".Time to begin listening to THEM archi-friends, and less to the sound of our own voices.

As an architect who "cut his teeth" designing structures in the lee of the Adirondacks (first building at age seven...even a seven year old gets-it) it is clear that shaping a facade to mimic a mountain cliff in Boston is to court winter disaster. An avalanche is going to go wherever it wishes. The bottom of the Most Difficult run, skiers, looks like the street to me....And watch out for those square moguls. More like a short-stop than an exhilarting-jump?

Frank Gehry's cavorting is the Dead End of the Modernism that got fully up to speed with Marchel Duchamp's urinal signed R.Mutt. Modernism is a secular religion that the likes of Walt Whitman began by asserting that the Poet was to be the New Priest, and Leaves of Grass a Newer Testament. (I taught and love old Walt, but the older I get the fewer of his poems move me enough to proselytize him.) And just as nineteenth century Biblical scholars applied rational tests to the Old Scriptures, so modern critics must blow the esthetic whistle when they judge an artist (including architects) to be off-side. How proud Gehry and the other Starchitects must feel designing museums and high risers for the Dubai oiligarchs, while Indian and Filipino migrants do the dirty work for peon wages, living in despicable hovels. Cameron Sinclair's Architecture for Humanity's "bible", "Design Like You Give a Damn!" is civilized alternative to being hacks for the luxury industry of globalization. Patrick D.Hazard, Weimar, Germany.