If there is a paucity of "serious" architectural achievement,it can't be
laid at the doorstep of the preservation movement. Good art will find a way
to exist. If it can't be built here because of regulation or reaction, then
it'll get it built somewhere else. I think its a down turn in a creative
cycle as much as anything else. Check out MTV sometime.
The reaction by the community at large to the scarey stuff that was built
in the middle of this century has been to be cautious about what we
allow.The "save everything " mentality of the preservation movement is a
reation to the same horrors. This too shall pass.
        Isn't there something fiercely internal about the appeal of
classical forms. If so, the "serious" architecture of the future will be
waiting for us to evolve because I don't think we change internally with
any great haste. Maybe we are just waiting for the next FLW.

Vince Lepre


>"Until Christian de Portzamparc's LVMH Tower opened last year on East 57th
>Street, Manhattan had not seen a serious piece of modern architecture in
>years.  In fact, since 1966, the year the Ford Foundation building was
>completed, the city has scarcely seen serious architecture of any kind. The
>collapse of New York architecture is a direct result of the postmodern
>reaction against the International Style....  If New York hadn't lost
>confidence in its creative energies, the Rose Center would look  less
>startling....  But architecture in New York is an interrupted art.  The Rose
>Center interrupts the interruption."
>
>-- Herbert Muschamp, review of the American Museum of Natural History's new
>Rose Center for Earth and Space, The New York Times, February 13, 2000.
>
>I concur with this observation, but not necessarily this thesis.  I weep
>that, in the last three decades, our buildings have had most of the nerve and
>wit ironed out of them.  But there must be some reason beyond (or at least in
>addition to) the "postmodern reaction against the International Style".  Have
>not other cities, indeed the entire nation, had the same or similar reaction?
>   Does our strong preservation law/constituency have some connection?
>
>Christopher Gray