In a message [log in to unmask] writes:
> I'd love to check out Cuz Chris' article,
Well, shucks, cousin, here 'tis, a profile of Henry Hope Reed, MORE OR LESS
as published in The New York Times on Septembre 19,1999:
BEGIN
The 36-year old Henry Hope Reed burst upon the architectural scene in 1952
with the most unlikely idea: that contemporary architecture was a joke, that
"clean and modern" was a fraud, that what America needed was not more flat
roofs and glass boxes, but more domes, more murals, more decoration. Now
that modernism is almost a dirty word, the angry young man - America's most
famous Classicist - has definitely changed: he's 84.
Henry Hope Reed was born in New York in 1915 and graduated from Harvard with
the Class of 1938. Mr. Reed was then not particularly aware of buildings,
but he does recall, in the late 1930's, riding in a car with employees of E.
F. Caldwell, a long established hardware firm specializing in traditional
designs. "As we drove past the new Museum of Modern Art they all shook their
fists at the building and yelled ‘That goddamned place is what's killing our
business!' I was astonished!" he remembers.
But in the early 1940's he took suburban driving tours to look at old
buildings with historian Wayne Andrews and the architect John Barrington
Bayley, and became sensitive to older buildings, especially those with
sculpture, mural decoration and other Classical elements.
But, in America around 1950 the architectural press gave traditional design
short shrift. The United Nations and Lever House seemed like the only future
for American design - who could argue against "clean and functional"?
Mr. Reed published "Monumental Architecture - Or the Art of Pleasing in Civic
Design" in Perspecta, the Yale architecture magazine, in 1952, and set out a
challenge which he has been repeating for the last five decades: "we have
sacrificed the past, learning, the crafts, all the arts on the altar of
‘honest functionalism'. In so doing we have given up ... the very stuff which
makes a city beautiful, the jewels in the civic designer's diadem." He then
barbequed one of modernism's choicest sacred cows, the United Nations
building, saying it has "the same attraction as the inside of an empty icebox
... mercilessly and savagely clean, a debauch of uncompromising cleanliness."
"Nobody said much of anything" he recalls now - such criticism was so far out
it was irrelevant.
In 1955 Mr. Reed wrote "American Skyline" with Christopher Tunnard, a history
of American city planning which lionized not traffic flows and parking lots,
but heroic, Classically-inspired urban architecture. When Ada Louise
Huxtable, later the architecture critic of The New York Times, reviewed the
book for Progressive Architecture in 1956 she called their ideal "a way of
building ludicrously out of character with contemporary life".
By 1956 a series of walking tours, lectures and exhibitions had made Mr. Reed
and his contrarian opinions well known, and he expanded his ideas with an
article in Harper's Magazine in 1957 "The next step beyond ‘Modern'". He
said so-called functional architecture has "run its course", and made an
impudent prediction: "the architects who now call themselves Modern will come
to see their work derided and replaced." He presciently observed Park Avenue
below 57th Street saying: "One glass facade ... has a certain attraction; ten
such facades, and there is nothing to talk about."
A New York Times editorial smugly noted that Mr. Reed did not say "precisely
when this transformation was going to take place", but Mr. Reed politely took
up the gauntlet to predict "in the next ten years" in a letter to the editor.
To further that goal, he published "The Golden City" in 1959, which summed up
a decade's worth of resentment at the replacement beautiful older buildings
with lesser modern works in the name of functionalism. In it he traced
modern architecture back two centuries, but his most effective technique -
still startling today - was to juxtapose pictures of Classical and modern
buildings. The 1892 Soldiers and Sailors Memorial arch in Brooklyn faces the
curving modern St. Louis arch. The deeply sculptured broken pediment of
Charles Platt's 131 East 66th Street facing the glass and concrete entrance
of 1025 Fifth Avenue of 1955. Beneath the classical buildings, he added long
descriptions of their rich ornament; beneath the modern ones, neutral but
devastating remarks like "no comment".
These photograph-pairs provided gleeful entertainment for a growing cadre of
preservationists and anti-modernists, and elevated blood pressure for the
existing architectural establishment. Why, this Reed wasn't even an
architect! In 1962 Progressive Architecture lambasted his "necrophiliac [cq]
architectural leanings" and "bloodcurdling desires for American architecture".
In 1968 Mr. Reed was one of the founders of Classical America, which
published a journal, gave lectures, started training courses for artists and
architects, and sought out worthy Classical buildings, new and old, to
promote. Since then he has published books on the Library of Congress, the
New York Public Library and watched as a tidal wave of traditional design has
washed over the American architectural landscape.
He's working on two books now, one with plates of Classical architecture and
one on the United States Capitol, both for W. W. Norton and due to be
finished next year. But he is not happy with the architectural revolution
which has swept over America, believing that "all the principal buildings are
still modern", by which he means that painting and sculpture are not
competently represented.
Mr. Reed is President of Classical America, but he says it no longer
publishes a journal and is not nearly as active as it once was; a nominal
rival founded in 1991, the Institute of Classical Architecture, is a beehive
of activity, with a website, lecture program and lavish journal.
When pressed for some architecture of the 1990's which he admires, Mr. Reed
says it is difficult, but finally offers John Bayley's wing on the Frick
Museum - built in 1977. He believes that the current emphasis on Classical
design in architectural schools is not bearing fruit - "they forget it once
they're out in the field" adding "I've learned that the Classical is hard
work, it takes discipline."
He admires individual buildings like the art-encrusted Appellate Courthouse
at 25th and Madison, and ensembles of buildings like the mansions on 91st
Street off Fifth, and the classically-inspired buildings on Park Avenue. He
still thinks the modern is ridiculous. Of the recent multi-million dollar
restoration project for Lever House he says "If they want to throw their
money away, that's fine with me."
He acknowledges that his 1957 prediction was off-target: "there has been
progress, but it's awfully slow". Mr. Reed says his next project will be to
revise and update "The Golden City", a publication which will almost
certainly raise the blood pressure of another generation of architects.
END
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