In larger projects, particularly masterplans, the manner of composing and articulating buildings still reveals itself as emanating from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to which many key American architects were sent in the early twentieth century. Then, up on the shelf (metaphorically as well as physically) could go the books the smart chat was reserved for parties or for daily one-upmanship and the architecture in the majority of respected firms could continue on a path of thinly concealed pragmatism. Never mind, that could wait for when you went into an office. Except that-er-D and G had no actual architectural clues on offer! In any ambitious state university Deleuze and Guattari's names would waft across the boards as readily as Le Corbusier or Mies might have done a couple of decades before. Not just in the bastions of Princeton and Harvard but way down the line-scores of bright (and articulate in that smart-quote kind of way) young graduates scattered themselves around the USA, spreading the Word through words. This was about the essentiality of theory and the implication-gradually but effectively built up-that architecture-as-made was a rather lesser pursuit than culture-as-dismembered. Hardly in the description of buildings, but in the playing out of revelations as to the depth and significance of philosophy, insisting on the debt that architecture should pay to the written culture of France, Italy, Germany. Seduced by such proliferation, a close inspection soon revealed where the real interest lay. Yet 10 or 20 years ago, a visit to an architectural bookstore anywhere in the world would elicit the pushing forward of numerous monographs of American architects, immense published support for American Post-Modern and not a few wittily argued broadsheets, fringe magazines and chitchat of all kinds from San Francisco, Chicago and Texas, as well as New York. Chipper field and Calatrava have little enough in common, ditto Nouvel and Co-op Himmelblau-at least, architecturally Yet confronted with the same discipline of gridded cities, potentially heroic corners and discarded back lots, faded downtowns and shredded edges, they invariably come up with something memorable or at least identifiable. It could be explained away on various counts if it were not that the diversity of choice continues to widen. Retrieved from Īs Europeans we shouldn't crow, but it does seem that all those aspiring American cities find it exciting to commission yet another architect from these parts for a museum/theatre/park/tallest tower or whatever gives them the dreaded 'icon' factor.
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