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