Letters.

OUTRAGE OUTRAGE

SIR: I regularly read your publication and find it to be, for the most part, intelligent balanced and thought provoking. However, your so-called 'outrage' column is not. In fact it is the exact opposite - naive, one sided, and facile. Still, nothing is perfect, so I have continued to enjoy the AR while regarding 'outrage' with slightly amused irritation.

However, the attack on Aldo Rossi in the January edition goes beyond the usual smug bigotry and enters the realm of the absurd.

Rossi was among the greatest architectural thinkers of the twentieth century -- few scholars would disagree with that. By so casually and superficially dismissing one of his last major designs, you actually damage your own intellectual credibility.

If you want to take the position that this is a 'bad' scheme, that would be fine if you could sustain an argument to that effect in a balanced article taking the scheme in the context of Rossi's (often subtle) ideas, and in the spirit of the age in which it was designed.

It is just too easy to make these cowardly 'hit and run' attacks on architecture you don't like -- a cheap alternative to proper debate.

Yours etc

JONATHAN R. J. BURGESS

Lewes, East Sussex, England

ECO CONFUSION

SIR: Am I the only one to be irritated by patently aesthetic design decisions being dressed up with bogus ecological and technical claims. I refer to your review of the school at Maeder in Austria by Baumschlager & Eberle (AR January 2000).

The building belongs to the current tendency emanating from Holland and Austria which uses glass as a veil over a facade of multiple layers. The effects are often stunning and this is indeed a very good looking building. However, with phrases like 'climate modifying skin' and 'ecological responsiveness' your review would have us believe that this is a design driven by green concerns. Close examination reveals this interpretation as misleading. For example one might expect that a glazed cavity like this would be used for passive solar heating or ventilation. No such use is apparent. Indeed the fact that the glass skin is applied on all four sides belies a preoccupation with geometrical purity rather than with solar aspect. Furthermore the large gaps between the glass panes would obviate any contribution to the thermal performance of the facade. It is obvious from the photographs that the inner layer is a complete facade with only the walnut panels in need of some extra protection. To describe the glass skin a s a rainscreen displays the technical ignorance of the writer. This would seem to leave the accommodation of the external roller blinds as the only technical pay off for this expensive overcoat of glass. That would be fine until you realize that unprotected external solar blinds have been a standard building component on the Continent for decades.

This is not meant as a criticism of the building which I find very interesting. It is the architectural critique that is at fault. It would seem that to discuss the building in terms of geometry, purity and diaphanous visual effects is not enough and that, much like the glass skin itself, a layer of specious techno-babble is required to make the building something that it is not. This sort of sloppy writing deserves no place in a magazine like AR.

Yours etc

JOHN MORAN 

[e-mail]

Despite its appearance, the school is not simply informed by aesthetic decisions as Mr Moran asserts. The cubic form offers the greatest volume with the least surface area and full-height windows act as passive solar collectors. It is claimed that optimized insulation, combined with a single-pane glass curtain wall and heat exchange system, contrive to reduce energy consumption by half compared with a conventional building. THE EDITORS

MODERNIST CHAMPION

SIR: We were overjoyed with Timothy Brittain-Catlin's comment that our book, The New Modernist in World Architecture, '[ldots] would be a fun and healthy book for a beginner' since we wrote and dedicated it to 'young potential designers' (AR January 2000). We hope the book will guide them away from narrow Post-Modernism, especially because we took such care to explain modern design as, taught by the Bauhaus. We hope the beginner will follow this design ethic and learn that Po-Mo is, to quote Philip Johnson, 'a joke'!

We regret the errors in the text but we were not given the opportunity, as promised in our contract with McGraw-Hill, to correct printers' proofs. We did want it to be perfect, of course. We are especially proud that yours was such a perceptive review. We are promised perfection in re-runs.

The Review is, we feel, most respected for its brilliant criticisms and it is a delight to see such beautiful architecture each month worldwide. Many of us here are very embarassed by being drowned in Po-Mo.

Thanks for the label as 'naive if they think that they can counter the great pretentious racket generated around Post-Modernism', but it is a start. No one here, except my friend James Marston Fitch, has dared to write an anti-Po-Mo book, with the Chapter, 'Murder At The Modern' exposing the start of the Po-Mo movement here. Also my friend, John Johansen said, 'Well Richard, you and Pat did it!'

Yours etc

PAT AND DICK SNIBBE

New York, USA

WEB OFFSET

SIR: The article published in the August issue of The Architectural Review (p 15) concerning the UIA website has come to our attention and a number of inaccuracies in the information thus communicated to your readers call for a reaction on our part.

While it is quite true that information on the organization of the XX UIA Congress in Beijing remained on the UIA site in August 1999, the dates of this event were clearly indicated and a visitor to the site could not have mistaken it for a coming event. A clear hypertext link to the Congress server in Beijing permitted instant access to information on the events that had taken place there.

With regard to international competitions, contrary to the information given, the list of current competitions systematically indicates the deadline for registration and highlights it with a flickering underline, thus leaving no place for misunderstanding. Furthermore as soon as the results of a competition are published, the competition exits from 'Current competitions' and is transferred to 'Results' where it introduces the list of winners and the projects selected by the jury. It is therefore impossible, contrary to what you publish, to access the 'results' of a 'current competition'.

I should also like to point out that the competitions announced on our site are competitions launched with the approval of the UIA, that is to say, according to the ethics and regulations drawn up jointly between UNESCO and representatives of the UIA member Sections. Consequently, it cannot be an exhaustive list of international competitions worldwide, but only a list of competitions for which the UIA is in a position to guarantee the viability, as is indeed shown by the considerable space given to this subject on our site and which your article has chosen to disregard. Finally, concerning the calendar of events, the information published on-line depends on details being received in good time, which is unfortunately rare.

Your article makes no reference whatsoever to the services offered by our site, such as the list of associations of architects in over 90 countries (UIA member Sections), with hypertext links to those (34 professional organizations) which are on the INTERNET network, or indeed the museums and architectural magazines offering the same electronic access (systematically and regularly tested) from the UIA site towards professional activities and architects throughout the world.

The partisan spirit of the article published by The Architectural Review causes prejudice to the International Union of Architects, and I feel sure you will understand our indignation that a well-known professional magazine should indulge in discrediting the ULA.

Yours etc

JEAN-CLAUDE RIGUET

UIA Secretary General, Paris, France

WHO GOT IT FROM WHOM?

SIR: In 'Letter from Berlin' (AR February, p30) we are informed that Daniel Libeskind wrote to the German Parliament to protest about Eisenman's plagiarism of his design of 'Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe', i.e. Eisenman 2700 close set concrete columns as compared to Libeskind's 49 (which, by the way, lean a bit and have trees on top).

This is not a case to be taken lightly. Although it is inevitable that the vast majority of architectural design is derivative, a modern memorial, however, a work of symbolic value, is expected to be a personal creation, to be unique. Especially where the subject matter is charged with historical and humanitarian significance, plagiarism would be cheating and would diminish its value. It would be an insult not only to its original author, but also to the memory it is supposed to serve.

Where does all this leave Libeskind? The Jewish Museum in Berlin seems to be a truly expressive and powerful building. However, in all the references I came across in the architectural press about its memorial garden, (and, as I recall, in his book about the project), there was no tribute to Louis Kahn as the original designer of the 'Memorial to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs'. The first of Kahn's designs (1966) was a group of nine pylons on a pedestal in a pure geometric arrangement. Your readers may be interested to read about his profound feelings about this project, and his choice of clear glass as the material for the pylons, the light and movement in this medium expressing 'the spiritual quality inherent in a structure'. This proved to be 'too abstract' and he had to produce revised versions, and it was never built. As the model photograph from this source shows, the similarity of Libeskind's garden to Kahn's original design is considerably 'more than merely coincidental'!

Is Libeskind tarred with the same brush as he is using on Eisenman? Is he commemorating the Jewish victims of the Holocaust at the expense of a deceased Jewish master architect? Unless, of course, he has openly paid a respectful tribute to Louis Kahn for this memorial and I missed it. Since he could not have copied Kahn's design if Kahn were alive, one should assume that he has. (If that is the case, I would welcome any references and offer my apologies.) Nevertheless, architectural critics should not exclude this point from their commentaries so that their readers or audience are better informed, and professionalism in architecture is upheld.

In any case, Libeskind's memorial is a copy and Eisenman's looks like a graveyard. Kahn's original design had the purity of feeling and design and is the one that should have been built,

Yours etc

BERNA BASATEMUR

London