Reading Week 3

I thought that from Bauhaus to our House was a really interesting book. I have to admit it was kind of hard for me to tell if Tom Wolfe was for, or against the different practices of modern architecture. I realize that a good portion of the book was spent in mocking different things at it, but I'm not sure if he preferred an particular mode or if he just thought them all ridiculous. Was he a white fan, or an International style fan? Admittedly his approving of either of those would be rather difficult to fathom given the corrosive way he wrote about them. The quotes he has from Robert Stern are none too flattering, though they are some of my favorite lines from the book. "He said Hejduk was doing the only thing his designs were good for: 'paper architecture.'" (page 97) Another good line was about Eisenman, "his theorizing gave Stern 'a headache,' and his houses were a 'superfluity of walls, beams and columns' that added up not to 'deep structure' but to claustrophobia.'" Jaquelin Robertson also has an awsome quote about the work of Graves. "His houses were crawling inside and out with a sort of nasty modern ivy in the way of railings, metal trellises, unexplained pipes, exposed beams, inexplicable and obtuse tubes - most to no apparent real of architechtural purpose."

Although I'm pretty sure I didn't understand all of the sarcasm and humor in the book, I thought it was really well written. I can see how such a book could be incredibly dull, but From Bauhaus to our House really wasn't. I very much agree with a few of the general ideas of the book. Namely that many of our building are too similar. They aren't unique. In older regions, such as Europe, and even back east there are buildings that are breathtakingly beautiful. I would love an opportunity to go and just walk around and look at the old plantations (even though if looked at in context many of them were built from the profits of slavery) of the south or the huge churches in Germany or England. There are some really beautiful buildings in Utah, too, but I guess I've just always thought that somewhere like Germany was just wall to wall elegant architecture. I'm glad that the world of architecture has entered a new stage, where it isn't International and sterile.