Announcing the Handbook

From ICA&CA's home office comes this exciting news:

The Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America is pleased to announce the completion of the first stage of its comprehensive design manual, Classical Architecture: A Handbook of the Tradition for Today. The goal for this publication is both straightforward and ambitious: To guide American architecture in the 21st century. Conceived for architects and builders across the country working in the broad classical tradition, the book will deliver the Institute’s signature pedagogy: lessons of the past, made applicable and accessible to contemporary practice.

(Go here for the first online installment of the Handbook.)

Classical Architecture: A Handbook of the Tradition for Today is made possible in part by a generous 2004 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Matching support was provided by the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, Roy Zeluck and Zeluck Windows and Doors, Christopher Browne, and the Arthur Ross Foundation, a supporter of the ICA&CA’s ongoing publications program, the Classical America Series in Art & Architecture, since its inception. 

This auspicious new cornerstone of Institute instruction is above all the brainchild of Christine G.H. Franck of the Institute's Board of Directors, and the expertise of ICA&CA faculty developed through years of teaching. Ms. Franck has long been a guiding force in our academic programs, framing and developing core curricula and training faculty to join her in imparting it, whether in the New York headquarters classrooms, at ICA&CA Chapter locations, or in regional partnership with the American Institute of Building Design. She is the Handbook’s editor.

W.W. Norton and Company, which has been a crucial partner since Classical America’s 1968 founding, will publish the full Handbook next year. At publication, Ms. Franck will deliver a lecture at ICA&CA headquarters in New York, and help the Institute and its Chapters, as well as the AIBD and like-minded builders, to spread awareness of its dense salutary content.

Today, as both prelude and complementary online resource, the ICA&CA is pleased to make available online a key section of the Handbook showing the foundation of our pedagogy: "The Elements of Classical Architecture," featuring detailed plates on moldings and the Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite orders.

These preview materials will be augmented in the published Handbook with further details of the orders in application, and chapters on traditional urbanism, proportion, interior architecture, and historic styles among other subjects of importance to today’s practitioner.

Upon publication of the full volume, additional sections of this web-based teaching tool will be expanded accordingly as a dynamic design aide with supplements about theory, manual skills, practice, and materials deemed duly significant as an enrichment of the printed volume. The web-based teaching tool expands the Institute’s reach in tandem with its growing audience around the country.

ICA&CA President, Paul Gunther states, “The board, staff, and growing national constituency of the Institute gratefully salute Christine G.H. Franck for the auspicious arrival of this central new teaching tool, distilling as it does many of the essential lessons that have long made our academic program a unique asset linking the classical tradition to contemporary practice. It brings to bear hopeful experience for the next generation of builders across the land in pursuit of design excellence.”

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional support has been received from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation and from Roy Zeluck and Zeluck Windows and Doors. The Institute gratefully acknowledges Leonard Porter for his assistance with online access. Special thanks are extended to Christine G. H. Franck for her guiding authority and editorial expertise.

Filler Up

New York's Pierpont Morgan Library reopened last spring following a years-long expansion. Long one of New York's cultural jewels, the library hired the Italian modernist Renzo Piano to design the expansion. Piano excels in his coolly elegant idiom, which has become the de facto "safe choice" for institutions that aren't quite up for the SoCal pop histrionics of Frank Gehry or the intellectually preening and messy avant-gardism of Rem Koolhaas. Piano has claimed his turf as one of the few architects who both has the imprimatur of the panjandrums and is at the same time thought unlikely to offend public or donors. Other architects may grab the headlines, but for better or worse we're living in Renzo Piano World.

Former Isaac N. Phelps town house (1853) on left, Renzo Piano entrance pavilion (2006) in center, Benjamin Wistar Morris annex (1927-28) on right

The Morgan Library was built in 1902-07 by the titan of finance who was also the greatest art collector in American history. (The library houses only a portion of what Morgan collected. After he died in 1913 the bulk of his collections was sold, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art the main beneficiary, although the Frick Collection and other museums also benefitted greatly. For example, the awesome "Fragonard Room" at the Frick contains the "Progress of Love" paintings that once adorned Morgan's dining room in his London town house.) Morgan's architect was the great Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead & White.

Murals by H. Siddons Mowbray (1858-1928)

Morgan, a great patron of New York architecture, had used McKim's partner Stanford White for the Metropolitan Club, and also gave work to Warren & Wetmore (New York Yacht Club), Horace Trumbauer (who designed the Park Avenue town house of Morgan's mistress Adelaide Douglas), and other top-drawer American architects.

The library contained Morgan's world-class collections of rare books and manuscripts, and also the great man's study. In 1927 Morgan's son, J.P. "Jack" Morgan, hired Benjamin Wistar Morris to design an annex to his father's library as part of the project by which Jack opened the collections to the public.

The Morgan's decision to hire Piano found validation in the New York Times, whose own new headquarters has been designed by Piano. Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote:

The original library, designed by McKim, Mead & White in 1906, is a landmark of Beaux-Arts design, but it was never a very welcoming building. Its severe 36th Street Palladian facade, punctured by a dark entry porch, makes you think of top hats and smoke-filled rooms -- a dignified reliquary for a dying culture. Morgan's son, Jack, built a boxy annex in 1928 as part of a broad effort to expand the institution's profile.

(Ouroussoff's piece can be read here. Scroll to the bottom of the page.)

Ouroussoff believes the Piano addition is superior to the original McKim building. One would think from Ouroussoff's description that McKim's building were some brooding brown Victorian thing. In fact, the gleaming walls of Tennessee marble make no one think of "a dying culture." McKim specified that the marble blocks be laid without mortar, as he had observed of the buildings of the Athens Acropolis. The style is High Renaissance, that of Peruzzi, Raphael, Vignola, and Palladio.

Baldassare Peruzzi, Palazzo Massimi alle Colonne, 1527

The design and construction, as well as the amazing contents, weave together some two millennia of design in the West, a tradition Ouroussoff thinks was "dying" in the early 20th century. Note also that all he says of the Morris annex is that it is "boxy."

That annex has lately taken some licks. In the New Yorker, Paul Goldberger, who when he held Ouroussoff's position at the New York Times taught his readers to value contextualism, had this to say:

The old Morgan buildings are awkwardly placed around the intersection of Thirty-sixth Street and Madison Avenue. The best of them, a dazzling Renaissance palazzo that Charles F. McKim designed as J. P. Morgan's personal library in 1906, is tucked away on Thirty-sixth Street. A dull, classical annex next to it, erected by Benjamin W. Morris when the library was opened to the public, in the nineteen-twenties, has the choice location, on the corner, and north of this is a staid nineteenth-century brownstone.

It is impossible to think of the old Paul Goldberger characterizing a first-rate example of contextualism as a "dull, classical annex."

Morris on left, McKim on right

(I do not believe Goldberger's essay is available online.)

But not every one of the big-time critics is so sanguine about Piano's handiwork. I nearly fell out of my chair when I read Martin Filler in the August 2006 House & Garden:

[T]he swagger, glamour, and unapologetic richness of J. Pierpont Morgan's collecting style is not to be found in these oatmeal-colored bins, only in the original interiors of the McKim building, restored by Beyer Blinder Belle with customary expertise.

OK, he's not toeing the party line, I thought. Then he finishes his critique with:

I can imagine a board meeting at which someone intoned, "We must bring the Morgan into the twenty-first century." This new project brings it into the twentieth century, but only half-way. Heretical as this may sound, the beloved, indispensable Morgan might have done better hiring a first-rate classical revivalist and moving into the more civilized eighteenth century instead.

Anyone have smelling salts handy?

Of course, there's plenty of coded language in what he wrote that I would normally love to pick apart. Halfway into the 20th century? What can that mean? (I doubt he was thinking of John Russell Pope.) "Classical revivalist"? Why not just "classicist"?

Yet, for a mainstream architecture critic (even a good one like Filler) to suggest what he suggests is indeed "heretical." But, as Frank Lloyd Wright was fond of saying, "There you have it." Kudos, big time, to Martin Filler. (Go here to read Filler's very engaging blog. There's a very funny posting about ICA&CA friend Philippe de Montebello.)

(Filler's House & Garden piece on the Morgan is not, so far as I can tell, available online.)

Readers of this blog will want to visit the Morgan in spite of the expansion. Where else, after all, can you see the Hours of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, that unexampled masterpiece of Renaissance illumination?

Giulio Clovio, 1546

You might say that "Morgan the Magnificent" had what we at ICA&CA call "a Farnese thing." Stanford White adorned Morgan's Metropolitan Club with (look hard) the lily of the Farnese.