Dialogue

NEWS
Metropolis is sad to report the recent deaths of four great architects over the past few months. Each has left an exceptional legacy. German-born architect Ulrich Franzen, known for his use of the Brutalist style, designed the fortresslike Philip Morris worldwide headquarters in New York City. The prodigious Italian Gae Aulenti, who in her lifetime mastered architecture, industrial and interior design, and urban planning, among many other things, converted the 1900 Beaux-Arts Gare d’Orsay, a Paris train station, into the Musée d’Orsay. John Johansen was a member of the Harvard Five group—the others being Philip Johnson, Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, and Eliot Noyes—which gained a reputation for its hugely influential modernist home designs throughout southwestern Connecticut. Lebbeus Woods’s science fiction-like designs were rarely realized, but he achieved his goal of illustrating, “what the world would be like if we were free of conventional limits.”

The Death of a Star
FROM PETER HIMMELSTEIN
What is your point (“Last Stars Standing,” by Philip Nobel, October 2012, p. 44)? That DS+R have it easy because they’re media darlings? That they’re somehow fraudulent? This article stinks of rectitude, a code of conduct that you deem worthy of praise. There’s a line between criticism that has a nuanced appreciation of the hard work that goes into the production, not to mention the realization, of serious architecture and criticism that’s self-serving and willfully contrarian. What you say are the limitations of “starchitects”—an inability to cope with the rather intense technical, political, and financial complexities of the process—is, in fact, one of DS+R’s great strengths.

FROM PATRICK VIA THE WEB
There are so many new buildings built every year. Many of them are average and a few better. The media has always been lousy at covering them and instead invented the star system that was based on personalities rather than buildings. This was always a bad idea, but I think Bjarke Ingels is almost the apex of this—someone who is known for his personality rather than architecture. Hopefully new media can broaden the attention, though it seems Twitter turns stories into gimmicky headlines. I want people to focus on good buildings. Starchitecture was always a joke.

Up Close and Personal
FROM MITCHELL S. AUSTIN
There is far too much “genius” in architecture already (“Uttering the D-Word,” by Karrie Jacobs, October 2012, p. 36). The cult of starchitecture currently imposes on cities sculptural follies of dubious lasting quality and character. We need less genius. What we do need is a more grounded architecture that respects human scale at the street. However, this does not mean that a well-grounded tower cannot inspire awe when viewed from a distance. It simply means that it must provide more at the street level—where the city actually occurs—than a spiffy subway entrance at its base.

Corrections
Lesser Gonzalez was the illustrator of the image provided by Interboro Partners (“Sharing Resources,” October 2012, p. 66).