Aesthetic confusion in Denver

"Bad" architecture in Denver, according to Denver FUGLY. Via CityLab.

The FUGLY Movement

Citylab airs a complaint about new high-density housing in Denver. The city is booming but some hate the design of new construction.

Most of the examples put up for the horror show don't actually look all that bad to me. For one thing, they are overtly "modern". Oops! The self-styled "Center for Advanced Research in Traditional Architecture" (CARTA) at Denver's school of architecture isn't happy about that. Some of the multi-family housing is even, believe it or not, nominally "Deconstructivist", imitating gimmicks from Peter Eisenman's IBA housing in Berlin. Wow! But yes, a mistake.

Left: "Decon" redux in Denver. Funky, yes, no? Denver FUGLY. Via CityLab.

In architecture, if not in economics, everything, and I mean everything, does indeed eventually trickle down.

Perhaps many of these projects do give modernism a bad name. But I think it's because they are so quickly thrown together. The problem is American development, not the particular architectural style employed. It's all about cheating the suckers with cheap lures and making a buck. Theme park glitz.

The accusers in Denver:

 'Every building going up is tan, brown, red or burnt red,' says Brad Evans, moderator of the Denver FUGLY Facebook page. 'That’s every color.' 

The developers' supposed defense, as critiqued by Christine Franck, Director of CARTA:

'Developers would say "this is what we have to do, this is what’s selling, this is what people want.' 

But look at what Evans likes:

 'My favorite building is probably the Michael Graves library, it feels like this institutional building but then it’s totally whimsical about it,' Evans says. 'And everybody hated that, when they first built it, everyone thought it was fugly.' ”

Yes, everyone hated it when it went up. Makes you think, maybe, yes, no?

Evans should just flash-forward himself 30 years, catch up with what's going on in architecture, and everything getting built now will look fine to him. Or almost.

Michael Graves, Denver Public Library (1995). Source: Archidaily, Estate of Michael Graves.

"Good" architecture in Denver as per CARTA (yawn). Swallow Hill Residences (2003) by Tryba Architects.

 I think a big part of the problem, as is pointed out in the article, is density. These are multi-unit buildings going up in neighborhoods formerly of single-family houses. I imagine that new developer single-family houses in the US are still in "traditional" styles. Do these "modern" apartment buildings respond to the new demographic of young urban dwellers across the country?

Amanda Pampuro 

Denver Battles With Its 'Fugly' New Housing  

CityLab (The Atlantic) 

March 14, 2017

Fracking North Dakota

A night-time satellite photo of the United States shows an unknown galaxy of lights in North Dakota, which turns out to be physical evidence of the new North American Oil Rush: it's the light from 100s of well heads flaring off gas. Here's the story by Robert Krulwich from National Public Radio, posted January 16, 2013 (edited by me):

"It's a little to the left, high up near the Canadian border. Just run your eye up that line of lights at the center of the country, look over to the upper left: There's a patch that looks like a big city — but there is no big city in that part of North Dakota. There's mostly grass. So what are those lights doing there? What is that?"

"What we have here is an immense and startlingly new oil and gas field — nighttime evidence of an oil boom created by fracking. Those lights are rigs, hundreds of them, lit at night, or fiery flares of natural gas. One hundred fifty oil companies, big ones, little ones, wildcatters, have flooded this region, drilling up to eight new wells every day on what is called the Bakken formation. Altogether, they are now producing 660,000 barrels a day — double the output two years ago — so that in no time at all, North Dakota is now the second-largest oil producing state in America. Only Texas produces more, and those lights are a sign that this region is now on fire ... to a disturbing degree. Literally."

"Only seven years ago, the U.S. was importing 60 percent of its oil. Now imports are down to 42 percent. The Bakken fields are helping to improve energy security."

"On the other hand, says Peter Lehner, blogger for the Natural Resources Defense Council, every day drillers in North Dakota 'burn off enough gas to heat half a million homes.....' "  

See the full story here.
Thanks to Craig Hankin for the link.

Help Save a Rudolph Building

© New York Times- Tony Cenicola

Paul Rudolph's 1971 Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York is threatened with demolition, as reported by James S. Russell on the Bloomberg web site (link here).

Please sign this petition to help try to save it:
http://www.change.org/petitions/orange-county-new-york-legislature-oppose-the-demolition-of-the-orange-county-government-center-in-goshen-ny#

Paraphrasing a note I wrote to Jim, we’ve got to fight harder for things like this. If they don’t like it, they should turn it into a library or a bed and breakfast or a luxury condo (quite a bit better than some of the latest in NY  by Nouvel, etc.). Take it apart and ship it to someplace that appreciates it, and give the county the cowshed they are pining for. Or let it alone; it would make a magnificent ruin. If we let things like this go we might as well pack up and give up.

Addendum April 8, 2012:
The debate reaches The New York Times, see article here.

One of the points made is that Victorian architecture was once just as unpopular. Here's how I explained it to a Facebook friend:  

"Brutalism is actually an architectural style, Lord Help Us. From the 1960s and 70s. It's all the rage among students now, just as the buildings are deteriorating and find few fans amid the general public. It's like what happened to Victorian architecture in the 1960s [and probably already in the 1930s] -- a lot of great things were torn down before people learned to appreciated their kinks and caprices. Now love for the Victorian is a mighty cliché. "

Images from a handsome report on the building in Archdaily Classics from various sources. Last two photos by James S. Russell for Bloomberg,

© "U Mass Dartmouth"

James S. Russell

James S, Russell

America's Six Miillion

Reading List
Adam Gopnik writes in the January 30 New Yorker on the second largest city in the United States, with a population of over six million: its prisons.

Gopnik writes:

"....it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still resonates:

" 'I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.' "

One of his interesting arguments:

"William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School [in his book The Collapse of American Criminal Justice] ... suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man.... 

"The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles....  Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong."

His solution:

"Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. 'Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges' is usually the very best thing to do with a problem.... To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime."

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1nzsz3hrN

 

Illustration: Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, 1829.

Image from Opacity.

Frampton & Vidler on the 1960s

Kenneth Frampton and Anthony VIdler (currently Dean of Architecture at Cooper Union in New York) have published two fascinating glimpses into the 1960s English background that led to the highpoint of New York architecture and theory in the 1970s and 80s, a story in which they themselves played major roles.

In a Columbia architecture school publication, Frampton recalls his early years as technical editor of Architectural Design (AD) under Monica Pidgeon in London (1962 - 65), offering a view into his formative years before arriving at Princeton in 1966 on the invitation of Peter Eisenman, whom he had met while Peter was doing his PhD. at Cambridge.

It's essential background for understanding Frampton's American phase; I wish I'd known something of all this when I studied under him in the 1970's.

Here we find:

• Frampton taking measured drawings of Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre; 
• Stirling and Gowan’s Leicester Engineering Building, source of a memorable cover design in 1964; 
• Atelier 5's Siedling Halen in Switzerland, where he stayed for a period;
• His "ideal model",  Ernesto Rogers’ Casabella Continuita. "Needless to say, I could not come close to this ideal, above all because the publisher’s rather fixed ideas as to economic paper sizes.... This was hardly the only impediment ... since I lacked both the graphic flair and the mature cultivation that emanated from its pages;"
• His interest in "a critical stance ... which went beyond [a] transatlantic Anglo-American cultural agenda" -- Gino Valle, Aris Konstandtinidis, Mangiaroti and Morasutti (Milan), Max Bill, Frei Otto, Jean Prouvé. "In retrospect I feel that my subsequent preoccupation with Critical Regionalism had some of its root origins in this moment, when I first began to look upon the culture of the European 'city state' with a different eye;"
• His aim "to turn the emphasis of the magazine more towards a latter-day humanist line as was represented, say, by Joseph Rykwert’s translation of Giulio Carlo Argan’s seminal essay 'On Typology in Architecture' which we published in December 1963;"
• Constant Neuewenhuy’s Situationist thesis 'New Babylon, An Urbanism of the Future', published in June 1964;
• The "emerging semiotic line" of Peter Eisenman’s Cambridge thesis 'Towards an Understanding of Form in Architecture' excerpted in AD;
• A "special issue ... devoted to the work of Pietro Lingeri and Giuseppe Terragni with a critical overview of Italian Rationalism... This was, in effect, the first attempt at recovering this lost wing of the Modern Movement since the end of the Second World War;"
• "A soirée at the British Museum with Nigel Henderson where I first met Camilla Gray, the author of The Great Experiment, with whom I shared an enthusiasm for Russian Constructivism. This was the same Camilla in whose company five years later I would witness Berthold Lubetkin in tears before a private showing of Lutz Becker’s 1971 assembly of archival documentary excerpts of the revolution in action. Camilla would later marry the son of Prokoviev and tragically lose her life, giving birth to their child in the Soviet Union;"
• Claude Schnaidt, "a committed left wing Swiss architect and historian whose early documentation of the work of Hannes Meyer remains unsurpassed to this day;"
• "Being invited to tea by Hans Scharoun in Charlottenberg;"
• "Frequent contact with Le Corbusier at 35 rue de Sevres;"
• And Yona Friedman: "Friedman was a member of the Franco-German Group d’Etudes de l’Architecture Mobile, otherwise known as GEAM; an anarchic connection that I thought was somehow at odds with his African fairy tales, his Boolean logic and his skepticism as to the role of modern art, about which he had the provocative habit of saying, 'I think there is one art and that is cooking.' ”

He closes with a reminiscence on his successor, Robin Middleton, who as acquisitions editor for Thames & Hudson commissioned Modern Architecture: A Critical History in 1970. The book "took me a decade to complete and ... would never have been brought to its final form had it not been for the specialist scholars he linked me up with and for his own testy but pertinent editorial voice, interjecting from time to time, 'You don’t need this sentence, you’ve said it already, you don’t need this adjective, it adds nothing.' In the end, I internalized this voice and hereafter my writing owes whatever conciseness and pertinence it has to his perennial presence whenever I pick up a pen."

A more densely-packed memoir of the era is difficult to imagine, with the extraordinary range of interests Frampton brought with him to Columbia.

Peter and the 60s also come up in the first part of Anthony Vidler's overiew in the October Architectural Review of the demand for a "unified field theory" of architecture. In his brisk trot through the postwar period, he pauses long enough to offer this on Eisenman in Cambridge in 1963, already a familiar portrait:

"The most radical departure from the Vitruvian triad, however, was that proposed by a young PhD student at Cambridge, Peter D Eisenman, who in 1963 propounded his faith in ‘the formal basis of modern architecture’ in a short article in AD...."

"In his formal Dantonism, Eisenman ... went on to refuse all outside reference for meaning in architecture, exorcising symbolic, iconographic and perceptual influences or interpretation. Instead he looked at the ‘primary configurations’ of buildings considered as structures of logical discourse − their internal spatial and volumetric considerations deriving the formal ‘linguistics’ of his understanding of architectural systems from Le Corbusier’s ‘Four Compositions’, and making their implications explicit. If for Summerson form was considered only in relation to proportional systems, or for Banham it was no more than a dead (academic) language, Eisenman saw all formal systems as communicative, based on the properties of form itself: this was the only criterion through which architecture could be thought a discipline."

 Stay tuned for the second and third parts:
‘Part II: Postmodernism to Post-Criticism’ (January 2012)
‘Part III: The Global Context: New Critical Paradigms’ (spring 2011)

Both Frampton and Vidler left cold post-postwar England for well-paid faculty posts in the US, together with James Stirling, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham, Joseph Rykwert and Alan Colquhoun
-- a major swath of the elite of British architecture (Norman Foster very nearly did the same in those tough years, he once told me in an interview), all to my very good luck as a student, and almost as important to American architecture in the long run as the wartime arrival of the continental elite -- Gropius, Giedion, Mies, Sert, Moholy-Nagy, etc.

Kenneth Frampton 
"Homage a Monica Pidgeon: An AD Memoir"
CC: Global Report
Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP)
2011

Anthony Vidler
"Troubles in Theory Part 1: The State of the Art 1945-2000"
The Architectural Review
September 11, 2011
(Free registration required)

Photos: Covers designed by Frampton during his tenure as AD's Technical Editor.
From "Homage a Monica Pidgeon"

Addendum
See my update on Vidler's second installment:
The Postwar Picturesque
Jan. 8, 2012

Upcoming Lecture

Next Tuesday, April 13th I will give the talk Manic Surges in Modern Capitalism: Architecture as Accomplice, Symptom and Response.

The talk is part of the Symposium Crisis and Cultural Change: XXIII Seminar on Anglo-North American Thought. It is sponsored by the Department of English Literature of the Complutense University of Madrid.

The talk is in English. It will be followed by a debate moderated by Fernando Rampérez, Professor of Philosophy at the Complutense. Time and place: 4:00 PM in the Salón de Grados of the Facultad de Filología y Filosofía, Edificio A, in the Ciudad Universitara of Madrid. More information: http://www.ucm.es/info/FInglesa/pensamiento.htm.

Over a Bowl of Fruit

 Interview with John Hejduk
El País, July 30, 1994, Babelia, Number 145, page 15.
©  David Cohn, El País 1994. All rights reserved.

New York architect John Hejduk speaks in parables around his subject, awkwardly, inarticulate, defensively combative and boastful, stumbling over words with the blunted accent of his native Bronx. Trying to express the motivating passions of his work, his only recourse is to repeat his startling images and associations: between the paintings of Edward Hopper and the streets of Berlin, which he sought to capture in his 1988 housing there, of the palpable "breath" of a statue of Bacchus, or how a bowl of wax fruit captures "exactly" how the 1930s felt in the United States: "That's - how - it - felt."


Like Frank Gehry, he belongs to that likeable species of unlikely intellectuals, the bashful, self-doubting beneficiaries of mass access to higher education in the United States. Born in 1929, he graduated in 1946 from The Cooper Union, a small, highly competitive private institution where tuition is free. After additional studies at Harvard and work in various offices, including I.M. Pei's, he returned to teach at Cooper in 1964, and has been its Dean of Architecture since 1975.

Hejduk's architectural production is unique and difficult to define, largely restricted to sketches and drawings, to what he calls "research into the soul of architecture," which he publishes from time to time in books he compares to musical compositions. His stark poetic images are marked by the obsessions of his postwar generation. Disillusioned with ideology, haunted by Hiroshima and the Holocaust, he and his contemporaries had retreated in the 1960s into a silent geometric formalism, the minimalism latent in the American Puritan tradition, but in his current work these long-hidden concerns find their voice through the same reduced vocabulary.

Of his most recent book, Soundings, he says, "All that work, right? The ideas and thoughts of a lifetime of 45 years. But here it is in the age of the soundbite, the celebration of chaos, an extraordinary day-glo attitude towards things. And I come out with a book that's BLACK and WHITE and JUST SKETCHES. Which has to do with the circle, the square, and the triangle. And it's like Bach in the sense that it plays on the frame of architecture. You keep on going with very simple elements and you get the tonal characteristics of sounds. Soundings has multiple meanings. It's a very Catholic book. In a religious way, too, a spiritual way. It hits many things, the Holocaust, Berlin..."

For Hejduk, the essential measure of architecture is the elusive concept of tone, an "unearthly sound-aura," a kind of materialization of spirituality: "When I look at a work of architecture my first question is, 'Does that building give off a tone?' It sounds trite, but the great cathedrals, they have tone. Le Corbusier's La Roche-Jeanneret house has tone. It appears to be a house, but all I have to do is change the names of the rooms and it becomes a church."

"My work appears to be simple. But the tone comes from the complexity of the thoughts, even the quantity of thoughts. That's the secret. Not to reduce something to a minimum condition but to achieve a maximum condition. And that will exude the final tone."

Hejduk sees his isolated role, with few built works to his name, as almost "monastic," "a radical act to preserve the spirituality of art." "The essence of my approach is my discipline," he goes on. "I am an architect. I love my discipline. And I believe I'm probably one of a very few, the true researchers. There aren't too many around, you know. You have medicine, right? You have the medical people who save lives. Like Salk. But there is also a group of people that are saving lives in a different way. They are no less."

But he rejects the idea that his work is strictly theoretical: "Hey, I'm an architect. And when I build, I build well. But it's a different attitude towards the practice of architecture." In fact, he deplores the emphasis given to architectural theory in recent years: "Language is drowning out architecture. Architects are trying to obfuscate language. Words, words, they're throwing them out. And it's all so thin. There's no thickness in it."

On his buildings for the IBA housing exhibition in Berlin, he says, "Too many architects don't breathe in the city that they are building for. They're not gentle. They have to express themselves in muscular terms, which have nothing to do with the ambience, the total history of a place. When I built the tower in Berlin, I really studied Berlin. I think I placed a building there that will always be part of that city in the deepest sense of the word. And yet it's a radical building. Hey -- I'm one of the few architects in all that thing that gave the people -- SPACE -- LIGHT -- AIR -- VIEWS --. I don't make separations between the socio-political, the aesthetic and the formal. It's all part of this great art of approximation."

Referring to his yet-to-be-built project in Santiago de Compostela for a botanical pavilion in the Belvis Park, he talks about the relation of material and space: "Glass and stone towers, connected by steel. Talk about building. Wow. No bullshit. The simplicity, the solidity of space, right? The great religious philosophers always talk about the soul of a material. You see? That's important. It's not just material. Few architects really know this."

But Hejduk feels that his message is finally beginning to get across. "More and more people are beginning to understand what I've devoted my life to. To both conserve and also present a new architecture, in the deep sense of the word. My works are tied to past things, but they are also future things. There is no present."

We ended the interview with the bowl of wax fruit on his desk, part of an exercise he'd given his students. First he asked them to choose which "tasted" best: a bowl of real fruit from a nearby Korean grocery, an identical bowl of wax fruit, or the fruit in a painting by Cezanne. "95% chose the actual fruit. I thought that they would like the Cezanne. I thought it was more delicious delicious. That was my naivete. Or maybe they were trying to give me a message."

The next assignment was to make a piece of fruit out of wood that "has to taste like the fruit." Hejduk took me through the studio to see the results: an exquisitely balanced banana, a split apple with white meat and tiny seeds, a bruised peach, the sun-dried skin of an orange, all eloquent dialogues between the properties of fruit and wood. Carried away with emotion, Hejduk told me, "I've become the student of them. A new school of architecture is forming, as radical as the Bauhaus was in its time. But through this (pointing to the fruit). Not words thrown into the air and obfuscation."

"My wife told me that the Pompeians always had a bowl of fruit on a table in their houses," he concluded. "And that bowl of fruit was not eaten by the family. It was for travelers and strangers. Now if that doesn't have to do with house and architecture, I don't know what does."

Georges Braque  
Plums, Pears, Nuts and Knife
1926
© Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

 

Philip Johnson Looks Ahead

We Can Do Anything
Interview
Published in Deutsche Bauzeitung, October 1993, page 176.
© Deutsche Bauzeitung, David Cohn 1993. All rights reserved.

Philip Cortelyou Johnson talks in a clipped telegraphic style, his thin voice pitched in sharp accents and emphases, his famous wit peppered with old-fashioned swear words and archaic contractions, like the voice of another New York society charmer, Truman Capote.

It wasn't an entirely satisfactory interview. In the first place, most of the questions were from Johnson to me: on Spanish architecture ("I think they're the best now," he opined); on Germany ("The Germans are impossible. I don't understand why. After the other war, they were wonderful... Mies and Gropius, everything came out of the defeat. But look, after this war... What comes out of the 50s and 60s? The 70s and 80s? The 90s? I'm working now in Berlin... So stuffy. So intellectually...").

Johnson skimmed over the topics of conversation like someone who has said everything before, someone in a great hurry to move along - the same velocity you see in his last big projects after the A T & T building. His cryptic references and ellipses accelerated the discussion into a verbal repartee, including the interviewer in that knowing, conspiratorial intimacy of New York insiders. A typical exchange, as we leafed through a portfolio of recent projects:

Me: "It looks like..."

Johnson: "It is. I copied it."

Johnson's verbal haste is also the haste of fashion, always a step ahead of his interlocutor, planning a surprise. Johnson had a couple for me. "Right now, I'm most interested in Frank Stella's work," he told me. "Architecture. He's really got something. He's working on Dresden in the park there. Dresden, Germany. He's got the models all over his studio. Studio, hell, he's got a theater." Later, he also enthused over Peter Eisenman's Max Reinhardt Haus project: "The latest thing in Berlin. Forty story tower. You know that one? Well, you go get it!"

Johnson has never claimed to have invented any new ideas, but from the International Style and Mies van der Rohe to Post Modernism and Deconstruction, he has managed to transform his position as wealthy dilettante and patron into that of an architectural power broker. And he has accomplished this precisely through a kind of mental acceleration -what is known in the fashion trade as "a sixth sense" or "a good nose"- that has kept him a step ahead of breaking trends, and made his career a dizzying spiral of changes.

Johnson offered me this laconic summary of the last thirty years: "My interests were awakened by Eisenman and my old friend Frank Gehry. I picked them for the Venice Biennial, as you know. They opened my eyes..."

"No, I'll go back. What opened my eyes was Venturi's book (Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture). I saw it before it came out, in 1962. And this last 30 years I've been working on helping the kids and following along, pitty-pat. I got fed up with my modern training."

"Then I went into Post Modernism, like the A T & T building. But that didn't satisfy me because, really, to pick up these themes today doesn't work."

"And why not?" I asked him.

"I don't really know," he replied. "I just felt dissatisfied with using themes from Ephesus or Romanesque capitals. What ever I would pick [to copy, presumably], I felt that something wasn't right. It was the ambience of course and the knowledge and the craftsmanship of the days when it came out and was real. So I said, `This is perfectly stupid'".

"And so then I got interested in and had a show on Deconstructivism, you'll remember. Silly, silly word. For God's sake, what does it mean? But it did give me a chance to get together with the guys that I think are good."

Arriving at his current interests, we began to get closer to substantial issues: "I think what we're introducing that's different from Modernism is the lack of Euclidian geometry. You'll notice it in the second prize in the Nara Competition, by Bahram Shirdel [then on view at the Museum of Modern Art]. There are other geometries, of course, that can be used. I never paid any attention to geometry. But anyhow, we're all through with Euclid, and the sense of axis, and pure Euclidian Le Corbusian rigidity, the perfect square, and all that."

Together with Euclidian geometry, Johnson's DeConstructivism has also freed itself from typology, functionalism, the Miesian grid and structural order in general: "So we're really in a perfectly marvelous new cycle, where the modern approach to functionality doesn't have to get lost, but it doesn't have to be stressed. And technology. The whole Miesian idea of Less is More is ridiculous, the whole Miesian idea of module, of using a grid. You don't pay any attention to structure whatsoever. You come in later and work it out. Well, sure. We can do anything. We haven't even begun to use technology yet."

At the same time, Johnson's former passions remain alive beneath the surface. He stumbled over his defense of DeConstruction when I mentioned Aldo Rossi: "No, he's good. Very very good. But the freedom that we all have now. I bet he could do that. I would love to see... Well, you should see the Stella project."

And when I asked if he had seen the reconstructed Barcelona Pavilion, he replied, "I should. But I'd be disappointed, you see. The wrong marble. The wrong glass. I know the building too well. I know I wouldn't like it." I later learned he never made it to the original.

Johnson hasn't had much of a chance to build a DeConstructivist design yet. One of his first opportunities and last skyscrapers, the twin-towered Puerta de Europa project in Madrid, escaped from his hands with the breakup of his long-standing partnership with John Burgee.

The two towers, which lean towards each other across the Paseo de la Castellana, the principal axis of modern Madrid, dominating the city's skyline, are to be clad in black glass trimmed in chrome and red stripes, a Johnsonian copy of the gridded skin of Eisenman's Checkpoint Charlie housing for the IBA in Berlin.

Johnson told me that the original idea was much more daring. "I started by taking the diagonal diagram of Rodchenkov. He did a drawing once of a building with a zigzag like that. When we got the job -I got the job- that's how we started out, but then it ended up being more of a classical scheme to fit what the client wanted across the Champs Elysées there. Is that going up now?"

The towers stand half-finished and abandoned (Johnson's reaction: "They must look better that way"); the builder, Prima Inmobilaria, is bankrupt, and its directors, the Spanish managers of the Kuwait Investment Office, are charged with defrauding the Kuwaiti government of thousands of millions of dollars.

John Burgee, the official architect of the buildings, is bankrupt too, in a bizarre drama which saw Johnson ousted from his own architecture firm. Johnson had brought Burgee in as a partner in 1967, to handle project management and the business side of the practice as Johnson launched himself into the commercial office projects of the 70s and 80s.

But in a tragic misjudgment, Burgee nurtured hopes of succeeding Johnson, hopes which were continually frustrated by Johnson's longevity, his unflagging popularity, and Burgee's inability to compete at the same breathtaking level (after all, Johnson made it look so

An absurd struggle took place over a number of years, with successive changes in the name of the firm that saw Johnson first paired with Burgee, then listed separately as a consultant ("My friends think I'm dead," he complained), and finally ousted entirely, in 1991. As clients abandoned Burgee and the recession paralyzed new building, another ousted partner, Raj Ahuja, successfully sued Burgee for his share of the firm's enormous profits from the 80s, with an award of 13.7 million dollars that threw Burgee into personal and corporate bankruptcy.

Johnson emerged from the disaster apparently unscathed, and now, at the age of 86, he is starting over in a new office that simply says "Philip Johnson Architect" on the door. Gone is the top-floor suite in the Seagram Building, the staff of 70, the backlog of huge corporate commissions.

Johnson showed me a portfolio of six current projects: a house addition, some small college buildings, and two small pavilions for the lawns of his Glass House Estate in Connecticut (which he has left to the National Trust for Historic Preservation as a future museum), all DeConstructive works with obvious borrowings from his friends and colleagues.

As we looked over his design for the Law School of the University of Houston, based on a sketch by Malevitch and Daniel Libeskind's project from the DeConstructivism show, Johnson muttered under his breath, "Damn, I wish I had the time to do these things again!" Now, more than ever, Johnson is a man in a hurry.